THEY WERE ON THE ROAD AGAIN. THERE WAS A FINE RAIN
falling. For weeks now they had been journeying through rugged country with only scattered villages. The car drove in front. The lorry carrying the workmen and their tools brought up the rear. The road was a very busy one. Villagers, dressed in their tightly fitting suits of thick black wool, were passing continually in both directions, on foot, on horseback, or perched on the backs of lorries. The general observed the lie and contours of the hills they passed with great interest. He tried to envisage the tactics that would have been adopted by successive armies during all the coun try's various wars.
Not far from the centre of one small town there was a newspaper kiosk. There were quite a number of people crowding around it, others were standing nearby reading, and some were glancing through their newspapers as they walked away.
'The Albanians read a great many newspapers,' the general commented suddenly.
The priest emerged from his torpor in the other corner. 'That's because they are so politically conscious. Now they've quarrelled with the Soviet Union they are completely isolated in Europe.'
'As they always have been.'
'But now they're under blockade. And with things as they are it's going to be hard for them to hold out.'
'All the same, having to blockade so small a country ... It just shows what stubborn devils they must be,' the general said. 'It looks as though it's impossible to subdue them by force. Perhaps they would succumb to beauty?'
The priest laughed.
'What are you laughing at?'
'At you. Because you've started talking like a philosopher instead of a general.'
The general looked out at the dark landscape swathed in mist, at the denuded flanks of the mountains and the multitude of stones of all sizes scattered everywhere over the ground. He felt a profound sadness well up in him. It was a week now since they had seen any other sight but rock covered slopes just like these, and he began to feel that beneath their stark wildness they were concealing some awful secret.
'It is a tragic country,' he said. 'Even their clothes have something tragic about them. Look at those black cloaks, and the women's skirts.'
'What would you say if you heard their songs, I wonder? They are even more lugubrious. It is all tied up with the country's whole past. Down the centuries, there can be no people that has experienced a sadder destiny. That is what accounts for the roughness, the harshness we see today.'
'Have they no happy songs?' 'Virtually none.'
The car was making its way down a mountain road. It was cold. Every now and then they heard the sound of lorries furiously revving their engines. At the top of a slope there rose the outline of a big factory still in the course of construction. Because of the bareness of the landscape the half-finished building stood out gaunt and gigantic against its backdrop of mist.
'It's a copper-processing plant,' the priest said.
Every now and then, when they came to crossroads, they would pass square, or circular, or hexagonal blockhouses with gun-slits pointing down at the road. At each bend the car emerged into their line of fire, and the general sat staring back into those narrow, deserted slits with the rain dripping endlessly across them.
We're past! he would say to himself every time the car passed out of the line of fire. But then at the next turn yet another blockhouse would seem to rise up out of the earth, and the car seemed once more threatened by its potential fire. The general let his eyes relax and focus on the rain streaming down the car window; but every now and then, as he began to sink into a doze, he imagined the car windows shattered into a thousand shards by bullets, and he would wake up again with a sudden start. But the blockhouses were all silent and deserted. If you studied them carefully from a distance they looked like Egyptian sculptures, with expressions that were sometimes cold and contemptuous, some times enigmatic, depending upon the design of the gunslits. When the slits were vertical then the little forts had a cruel, menacing expression that conjured up some evil spirit; but when the slits were horizontal, then their strange petrified mimicry expressed only indifference and scorn.
At about noon they came down at last into the plain and eventually arrived at a village composed of two lines of houses strung out on either side of the road. The rain had stopped. The usual crowd of children began gathering about the car. They could be heard calling to one another in the distance as they ran towards the main street along parallel paths. The lorry drew up a few yards behind the car, and the workmen, leaping out over the tailgate one after another, began jumping up and down and waving their arms in order to get the circulation going again in their numbed limbs.
Passing villagers stopped to stare at these strangers. But they did not seem to be unaware of the reason for the visit. You could tell that from their faces. From the women's especially. The general could recognize it easily now, that indecipherable expression in the villagers' eyes. We remind them of the invasion, he thought. Wherever we go, you can always tell what the war was like there just from their expressions. The fiercer the fighting was the more enigmatic their faces.
At the edge of the village, in a piece of fallow land, a considerable number of graves had been arranged in rows. The cemetery was surrounded by a low wall, breached in places. The men lying there are all ours, the general said to himself. And he drew his long waterproof cape closer about him to keep out the chill of the thought. A little ahead of him, standing quite motionless, the priest had the appearance of a black cross in a Mexican engraving. It's easy to see how they came to get themselves surrounded, the general thought. Then they must have tried to escape by that bridge over the river there, and that's where they will have got themselves wiped out. What idiot of an officer could have led them into a hornets' nest like that? There's nothing on the graves to tell us.
The Albanian expert began the customary formalities. Further on more graves appeared. They were all very much closer to the village and had red stars at their heads. The general recognized it immediately as a 'martyrs' graveyard', as the natives of the country called the plots where the partisans were buried. In this one, seven of his countrymen had been buried beside the Albanians. Despite the spelling mistakes it was still possible to make out the names of the seven on the little metal labels with their red stars, together with their nationality and the date of their deaths-identical for all seven. On a stone plaque nearby was the inscription : 'These foreign soldiers died heroes' deaths, fighting beside Albanian partisans against the forces of the Blue Battalion, 17 March 1943.'
'That Blue Battalion again,' the general said as he walked between the rows of graves. 'This is the second time we've come across Colonel Z.'s tracks. And according to our lists there should be two men of his battalion buried in this very village.'
'We must ask the villagers whether they know anything about the colonel,' the priest said. 'Though of course he was still alive in March 1943.'
'Yes. But it will do no harm to enquire all the same.'
While the visitors were busy with their inspection of the site, a number of men from the village had unobtrusively gathered along the graveyard boundary. Then a few women and a group of children had appeared too. The children, bolder than the adults, had even ventured through a gap in the wall and were now standing just inside, whispering in one another's ears and shaking their little blond heads. All eyes were on the little group walking up and down between the rows of graves.
An old woman carrying a keg on her back joined the villagers.
'Are they taking them away?' she asked in a low voice. 'Yes, yes, they're taking them away,' several voices murmured in reply.
Her burden still on her back, the old woman surveyed the scene in the cemetery for a while with the other villagers. Then she walked forward several steps and spoke to the workmen:
'Make sure you tell them not to mix those seven up with the others. We mourned those with our own, according to the custom.'
The general and the priest turned round to look at the old woman, but she had already turned and was walking away. They watched her little keg swaying from side to side for a moment, then she was hidden by a bend in the road.
The villagers strung out along the edge of the cemetery were so still that it would have been easy not to notice their presence there at all. They all stood watching with the utmost concentration, determined not to miss a single move ment made by these men walking up and down inside the cemetery, their coat collars turned up against the cold, apparently searching for something, though without success. 'Work in both cemeteries will begin tomorrow,' the general said. 'Today we shall try to find the two "Blue Battalion" soldiers and the crashed pilot.'
Everyone in the village knew about the pilot. The wreck age of his aircraft had been strewn all through the little wood on the far side of the village. The pilot had been buried by the peasants then,1selves, near his plane. There was hardly any sign of the grave left now, except for a big stone that presumably marked its head. As for the plane, there was nothing left of that but a pile of rusty metal. One of the villagers told them how they had gradually stripped it of all the items that could be of any use to them, from the tyres and other rubber components-burnt during the war in place of candles-to the heavier metal parts, which had been put to innumerable different uses.
Two of the workmen started digging straight away. The others began making their way back to the village.
The rain had stopped long before, but the ruts left in the track by carts and tractors were still full of water. Here and there half-used haystacks loomed, still dripping wet. Between the cypress trees, the steeple of the old church stood out in the distance against the sky, and from a field even further away there came the muffled roar of a tractor.
They ate lunch in the vehicles, then went to have coffee in the co-operative club. The room was very smoky and there were almost no tables to be had. A little radio was shrieking its head off, the volume turned full up. The villagers were all chattering at the tops of their voices. It was easy to see, from their sun-bleached hair and their creased skins, that they were plain-dwellers. Also, the timbre of their voices was different from that of the mountain people -gentler, more melodious.
As he sipped his coffee, the general let his eyes wander round the walls, trying to read the slogans blazoned there in bright red print. All he could make out were the words 'imperialism', 'revisionism', 'plenum', and the name Enver Hoxha at the bottom of a brief quotation.
After a short while, the expert rejoined them in the club. He was accompanied by a young man wearing a very wide ribbed corduroy jacket. Both men came over to the table where the general was sitting and the expert did the introductions. 'The head of the co-operative. The general .. .'
The young man fixed his grey, slightly astonished eyes on the foreigner for a moment, then turned back to the expert. 'It's very simple,' the latter began. 'This week we expect to be doing exhumations in the two military cemeteries out side your village. We have our own workmen of course, but to get the job done quicker we should appreciate some help from you as well, if it's possible.'
'You need more men?' the head of the co-operative asked. 'Precisely.'
The young man paused for a moment in what appeared to be embarrassment before replying:
'The fact is our men are rather busy just at the moment. It's right in the middle of ploughing for one thing, and also our tobacco and cotton aren't doing too well this year. And apart from that .. .'
'But it would only be for a few days,' the expert broke in. 'And of course all the co-operative workmen we use will be properly paid. These people' (and the expert indicated the general and the priest with hi eyes) 'are prepared to pay thirty new lek for every grave opened and fifty for each opened grave that proves to contain one of their men.'
'We pay well.' The general emphasized the point.
'It's not a question of that,' the head of the co-operative said. Im wondering whether this kind of work is authorized by the government.... I mean, if .. .'
'Oh, you can set your mind at rest on that score,' the expert interrupted him again. 'I have a permit from the Presidency offices. Take a look.'
The young man read the document held out to him, then thought for a moment.
'But even so, you'll have to get approval from the district executive committee.'
'Of course, of course!' the expert said. 'We'll get it tomorrow, when we go into town.'
'As far as I'm concerned, I can let you have ten men for three or four days.'
'That should see the job finished then.'
The general thanked the young man and the visitors rose togo.
No one in the village had even heard of the existence of the two Blue Battalion soldiers who had been killed and buried in the area. Colonel Z. was a different matter. The older villagers remembered him clearly. He had led his battalion through the area twice, and both times he had fired the village. The younger people only remembered clambering up the hill where they had all taken refuge-leaving cattle and belongings below-and then sitting up there watching their homes burn down.
But no one had even heard the two soldiers mentioned, either then or later. This probably meant that the two men had been buried by their own side after the villagers had evacuated the place.
'Well, it won't stop us finding them,' the general said. 'The place where they were buried is clearly marked on the map. The only reason I wanted to question the villagers was because they might have been able to provide us with confirmation and so speeded things up.'
He spent over an hour with the Albanian expert trying to work out, with the help of the information on the map, the precise location of the graves. Finally they succeeded. The spot turned out to be inside the co-operative's calf shed. Accompanied by a group from the co-operative, they made their way there, and having cleared the animals away from the presumed burial areas they began digging. The calves gazed at the intruders with their beautiful, tranquil eyes, and the pleasant smell of hay hung in the shed.
Before nightfall the remains of the pilot and the two soldiers had been recovered. Those of the pilot had been found without difficulty, but before unearthing those of the two soldiers they had been obliged to open up trench after trench, and when the general finally departed the floor of the calf shed looked as though it had been under heavy shellfire.
The workmen filled in the trenches without hurrying; they were going to sleep in the village. The general, the priest, and the expert, however, had decided to spend the night in a small town about thirty kilometres away. They were due to return early the following morning.
It was already dark when they set out. Their car started off slowly, avoiding the ruts, its headlights sometimes lighting up the poplars lining the road, sometimes a cart coming in from the field or a farmyard with its fence of tall reeds.
'Stop!' the priest cried suddenly, just as they were driving back past the part of the cemetery where their own soldiers were buried.
As soon as the car was stationary he got out. The general followed, slamming the car door violently behind him. The expert also climbed out.
'What is the meaning of that?' the general cried, pointing at the low wall.
Scrawled in charcoal, in big, badly formed capitals, were the words : Such is the 'fate of ·our enemies!
The expert shrugged.
'It was done this afternoon,' he said. 'There was nothing there this morning.'
'We are aware of that,' the general said. 'What we should like to know is what the purpose of your government is in inciting its people to shameful provocations of this kind.'
'I can't see anything shameful in it,' the expert said calmly.
The priest had pulled out his notebook, apparently in order to copy down the words written on the wall.
'Nothing shameful?' the general exploded. 'Words like that scrawled on the wall around our dead! I shall report the matter. It is a serious matter, a deliberate provocation, a contemptible insult.'
The expert turned back angrily to face him.
'Twenty years ago you scrawled your fascist slogans on our comrades' chests before you hanged them, and now you pretend to be appalled by a few simple words like that, probably put there by a schoolchild.'
'We are not talking about what happened twenty years ago,' the general interrupted him.
'It still applies, nevertheless.'
'It's got nothing to do with what happened twenty years ago!'
'You are always talking about the Greeks and the Trojans. Why shouldn't we talk about what happened twenty years ago?'
'Talk like this will get us nowhere,' the general said. 'It's very windy out here.'
All three walked quickly back to the car. The doors slammed furiously behind them, one after another, like guns firing, and the driver set off again. But in less than five minutes they were forced to stop again.
Outside the village, just over a wooden bridge, the road was blocked by a cart that had just shed a wheel. Two peasants were trying to fasten it back on again.
'We're very sorry,' one of them said to the expert as he got out.
'It doesn't matter.'
Without breaking off his struggle to get the wheel back on, the villager asked the expert :
'Where are you from?' The expert told him.
'This morning we were told why you're here,' the man said. 'All the women in the village are talking about nothing else. They started the moment they saw your car and lorry driving in.'
'Push, can't you, damn it!' the other peasant grunted as he strained on his side to get the wheel back on.
'They said you're going to get all the foreign soldiers up out of their graves and take them back to their own country,' the first peasant went on, unperturbed. 'And that you're going to dig up all the ballistes* along with them, and take them away too, into a foreign country beyond the sunset. Is that true?'
The expert began to laugh.
'That's the story they're telling,' the peasant persisted. 'So that even now they're dead they'll still be with the enemy, just the same as when they were alive. Allies yesterday, allies today. That's what they're saying in the village.'
The expert laughed again.
'Well, it's not true,' he told the man. 'No one is going to bother with the dead ballistes.'
'Hey, push, will you, I say!' the other peasant grunted again. The wheel wouldn't stay on.
There were dogs barking in the distance. Someone was approaching from the fields carrying a lantern. The light from it quivered, as though it was afraid.
'One of your wheels playing up then?' the new arrival asked, then lifted his lantern to gaze with astonishment at the strangers and their car.
There was a silence.
'Have you come from the cowsheds?' the first peasant asked.
'Yes, I been over there.'
After standing there for a further moment observing them, the man in the cowsheds wished them a good night and moved on. The light from his lantern threw pale patches onto the haystacks standing in a silent row along the edge of the road.
The dogs were still barking.
* Albanian collaborators who worked with the occupying Italian and German forces.
'Do you always do this kind of work?' the peasant asked the expert.
The expert nodded his head affirmatively.
'Yes,' I've been doing it for quite a while now,' he said a moment later.
The peasant gave a deep sigh.
'Not a very happy job to be doing.'
The driver began whistling a recent popular song. 'Come on ! One and two and push!'
The wheel was back on at last.
'Good night!' The cry had come from a group of villagers returning across the darkening plain, hoes over their shoulders.
'Good night!'
At last the cart was pulled clear of the road and the car continued on its way towards the main road ahead.
The October night had now descended over the plain. The moon, having given up its vain attempts to break through, was pouring its brightness down into the spongy layers of cloud and mist, which now seemed to have become saturated with its pale light and were slowly, gently, evenly letting it drift down onto the horizon and the vast open plain. The sky above them had acquired a fecund glow, and the horizon, the plain, the road, all seemed to be covered with pools of milky light.
There were those autumn nights when the sky was possessed by an aspect of strange brightness, wholly steeped in the indifferent, haunting light of the moon. And lying on the ground, on our backs, every one of us must surely have said to himself: 'My God! What a sky!'
The road was full of potholes that suddenly appeared in sharp outline, big and black, as the headlights swept the darkness away from above them.
After they had driven for about an hour, the lights of the town appeared in the distance.