THE CAR DREW UP OUTSIDE THE ALBTOURIST HOTEL. IN THE
rain-soaked streets, in front of the neon-lit shop windows, the occasional passer-by was still to be seen. But the cold night wind was sharp as a knife flaying your face, and the travellers hurried into the shelter of the hotel lobby. There were plenty of rooms available because the tourist season was over.
'Do you require rooms looking onto the river?' the manager asked in halting English.
'Yes, if that's possible,' the priest answered. 'Thank you:
A pageboy helped them carry their luggage upstairs.
'The view from here is very beautiful,' the priest said when they were shown into their room.
'You've already visited this town?' 'Yes.'
'How many times have you been in Albania exactly?' 'Several times during 1938 to '39, and then again in the middle of '42. But the situation here was very different during every one of my visits.'
The general went over to the window and pulled the curtains apart. Across the plain the same troubling brightness was seeping down from the moon. He closed the curtains again and lit a cigarette.
'Shall we go down to the restaurant?' the priest said. 'Yes, of course.'
Out in the corridor they met the expert emerging from his room with a towel over his arm.
'Are you coming down to dinner?' the priest asked him.
'I shall be down immediately,' the expert answered. Then added: 'The lieutenant-general we met in the mountains two weeks ago is down in the restaurant.'
'Really?'
'I can only assume that they have some exhumations to do in the town.'
Two weeks before, they had been driving along a road running beneath the flank of a vast plateau when the general, sitting silent in his corner and fitfully dozing, suddenly noticed something very odd.
Up on the mountainside a group of what looked, from their blue overalls, like municipal roadworkers were busy digging holes in four or five separate spots. Further on, in the road stood a car with a canvas-covered lorry parked behind it. The two vehicles were identical with their own. A man in uniform, tightly belted into his raincoat, was standing beside the green car. Another man, dressed in black, was standing at the side of the road.
What is this mirage? the general asked himself, his mind still half asleep. Am I dreaming? He felt it must be himself, the priest, and their own workmen he was looking out at. He screwed up his eyes and lifted his arm to wipe away the mist obscuring the glass. It wasn't a mirage.
'Just take a look over there,' he said quietly to the priest. And the latter, turning in the direction indicated, made a gesture of surprise.
'Would you stop here, please,' the general said to the driver.
The man brought the car to a halt. The general wound down the window on his side and pointed over to the right. 'Take a look at those men up there,' he said to the expert.
'What are they doing?'
'They are opening up military graves.'
'How is that possible? They have no right to excavate without informing us.'
'It is their own soldiers they are looking for,' the expert said.
'Ah! Really?'
'It is over a year since our government signed the contract with theirs, but their preparations took them longer than they expected and they did not begin work until this past summer.'
'Ah! Now I understand. Is he a general too?'
'Yes, a lieutenant-general. The other man is the mayor of one of their cities.'
The general smiled and said:
'All we need now is a general with a hodja in tow.' 'There would be nothing very surprising in that. The Turks may well come to fetch their dead back one day.'
While this exchange was taking place between the general and the expert, the two strangers standing on the side of the road had turned around and were looking towards the new comers with curiosity.
'Let's get out,' the general said, opening his door. 'They are colleagues of ours. It might be as well to get to know them.'
'What for?' the priest said.
'We can pool our experience, since we're all in the same profession,' the general said with a laugh.
As he walked closer he noticed that the other general had had his right arm amputated. In his remaining hand-the left one-he was holding a fat black pipe. The civilian was a corpulent, bald man.
The introductions over, they conversed for a while in bad English while the two lorry drivers haggled over some kind of technical exchange. They opened and closed the hoods of their vehicles several times and apparently ended up by reaching an agreement satisfactory to both sides.
Ten minutes later, having taken leave of their new acquaintances, the general and the priest set off again.
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 other two had finished their meal and were just asking for the bill.
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 quiet 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 our country's 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.'
'Our graves?' the one-armed general said. 'Perhaps not, 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 foot ball stadium on top of a military cemetery,' the priest said. 'It is contrary to all the international agreements. You ought to put in a protest.'
'We already 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. Why that odd phrase? He dragged his eyes away.
'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.
'We have work here for several days,' the priest said. 'We have two cemeteries to examine. One large, one smaller.'
'You have extremely accurate lists at your disposal, I believe.'
'Yes, yes indeed.'
'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. And tiny though they are they have proved of the greatest value to us in our task. They are more or less indestructible.'
'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" .'
'Yes, extremely 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.'
'Nor have we.'
'But even so, one should not neglect to take every pre caution.'
'Fortunately however, from what I've seen, the workmen are extremely competent at the job.'
'That is my impression too.'
'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 have a letter to write.'
They wished the two generals good night and disappeared up the thickly carpeted red stairs. The lounge was quiet. The only sound was that of the two young men talking in the far corner, fragments of whose conversation could occasion ally be clearly 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 from 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 arm chairs, 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 full of people watching us dig up the field. Among the crowd I can see that girl in her blue rain coat. 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 there seems to be something muffling what they are shouting, and the noise is so loud I can't catch even the ghost of his name. And that happens pretty well every night. So you can imagine how I feel!'
'It's explicable 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 from along the paths between the graves, all carrying telegrams in their hands and looking for the graves of their sons or husbands. 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. 'It is a sort of facsimile of the war that we are fighting.'
'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.' 'And what happened then?'
'Some children threw stones at us.' 'Stones!'
'Yes.'
'And you didn't protest against such an insult?' 'Who said we didn't protest?'
'I am amazed,' the general said. 'An act of such ... such barbarity.'
'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, very true.'
They ordered two more coffees.
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 some thing 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 some thing 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.