The light from outside, filtered into stripes by the blinds, kept whirling round and round in his head. He shut his eyes to shut everything out. But no sooner were his eyelids closed than the long, stark barrack room reappeared even more clearly, with those bewildered recruits standing in front of the long table, completely naked, like pale, pale candles. The general got up again. It was dinner time. He went out into the corridor with the intention of finding the priest. A passing chambermaid told him the priest had gone out. He went back to his room and phoned down to the desk to ask if the lieutenant-general was in the hotel. Then he walked out into the corridor again and saw him approaching. They walked slowly and in silence down the marble stairs. The lobby below was still as full of bustle as it had been earlier and the two telephones were still ringing non-stop.
In the lounge they had difficulty finding a place to sit. Through the nearby window, looking out onto the boulevard, they could see the sight-seers walking past, and up in the sky the rockets’ blazing sheaves of light, opening and falling back down, like thick multicoloured snow, towards the crowd and the dark trees of the park, only to die after a moment and plunge everything back into a darkness that seemed even deeper than ever.
The lieutenant-general ordered raki, the general brandy.
The sounds of the dance band in the basement came wafting up to them, and the wooden stairs leading down to the taverna were constantly creaking beneath the feet of the customers arriving and leaving.
They touched glasses and drank. Then they sat there for a long while without speaking. The general refilled their glasses. It seemed easier than starting up a conversation.
Outside, the rockets continued to explode, and from time to time their reflections starred the window.
“They are celebrating their victory!” the general said. “Yes, as you say.”
They watched the sky light up as though a gigantic flaming helmet was sinking earthwards from it, glittering with innumerable sparks, only to pale suddenly, lose its warmth, and vanish back into the womb of night. “A pretty mission, ours!”
Once more he was wondering which was the worse, the war or this funereal pilgrimage that came after.
The general looked at the empty sleeve tucked into the tunic pocket.
Yes, we can all see you’ve been in battle all right, he thought.
“Yet in a way it is war, what we deal with,” the lieutenant-general went on. “The remains we dig up constitute war’s very essence, you might say. What remains when it is all over; the precipitate after a chemical reaction.”
The general gave a bitter smile. “Poetry!” he muttered to himself. He filled the glasses again.
“I’m sure you’ve heard that pearlfishers’ lungs sometimes burst when they dive too deep. Well, that’s what happens to your heart with this job of ours.”
“It’s true. Yes, it’s sad enough to break your heart.”
“We’ve reached our limit,” said the general. “We’ve been defeated by the shadow of their arms,” said the other. “What would have happened if we had really had to fight?”
“If we’d fought here? Perhaps it would have been better if we had!”
They spoke further of the war and its double, without ever concluding which of the two they opted for.
The music was still coming up from the basement night club, and the coffee machine occasionally emitted a hissing jet of steam like a miniature locomotive.
“Do you remember the football stadium I told you about that first evening we talked together?” the lieutenant-general said.
“The one where they wouldn’t let you start digging till the football championship was over?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Yes, I remember it, vaguely. You’d begun excavating round the edges of the field, as I remember, and you told me about the rain, how it streamed down the grey concrete tiers of the stands.”
“Yes, the graves ran all round the football and basketball fields like a sinister black dotted line, and the rain did cascade down the stands. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of.”
“What then?”
“Didn’t I tell you - I think I did - about the girl who used to come and wait for her young man every afternoon, while he was training?”
“Yes, you did tell me something about her, but I’m afraid I don’t remember exactly what.”
“Well, she came there every afternoon. And when it rained she used to pull up the hood of her raincoat and just stand there, in one corner of the stadium, under the pillars by the players’ entrance, just following her young man with her eyes as he rushed about on the pitch.”
“Ah yes, now I remember,” the general said. “The raincoat she wore was blue, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right,” the lieutenant-general said. “She wore a pretty blue raincoat, and her eyes were an even lighter blue. They were a little cold, perhaps, but I’ve never seen any more beautiful. So there she came and stood, every day, and we for our part just kept on digging, until in the end the field was totally surrounded by open graves.”
“And what happened then?” the general asked without much interest.
“Nothing, nothing in particular. As evening approached the young men stopped training, and then one of them would throw his arm round her shoulders and they’d go off together like that.
And at that moment every day, believe me, I felt such an emptiness all around me, I felt my heart so heavy that the whole world seemed to me as abandoned and as meaningless as that dark, empty stadium. Would you believe it? At my age!”
It’s true he doesn’t look like a great lover, the general thought.
“But life is like that,” the other continued. “Just when you least expect it a crazy, senseless dream begins to take root in your mind - like a flower growing on the edge of a precipice! I was a foreign general, and what’s more a middle-aged cripple, I told myself; my only reason for being in this country was to collect the bones of my fellow countrymen, so what could there possibly be between me and that young, foreign girl?”
“Nothing. Nothing of course. But as far as thinking about her goes - well there was nothing against that. We all of us have wild dreams sometimes, especially where women are concerned. Why, one summer not so long ago, at the seaside … “
“There were times,” the lieutenant-general went on, paying no attention, “there were times when I attributed my nervous exhaustion entirely to her, to the fact that my thoughts were so totally obsessed with her; but even then I knew it didn’t really explain my depression. It wasn’t so much the girl herself troubling my mind as something else, something vague, more abstract, something that was attacking me indirectly, through her. Do you understand?”
“I think so, yes. What disturbed you in her, it seems to me, was her youth, the fact that she seemed such an absolute manifestation of life. It’s such a long time now that we’ve been running up hill and down dale sniffing for death like hyenas, trying to find ways of coaxing it or smoking it out of its lair, that we have almost forgotten that beauty still exists on this earth … Listen, last summer on the beach, as I told you, I myself…”
“At my age!” his colleague broke in again. The general almost gnashed his teeth. He couldn’t stand people who were so wrapped up in themselves. That’s how he’d been listening, with clenched jaws, while the other went on and on about the football stadium and the stands and the girl in the blue raincoat.
Some suitor! he mused.
Once he realized that this adventure he had been through … the summer before last, on the beach … even if the other gave him the leisure … he no longer felt the slightest urge to speak of it (for a moment he had really believed in that little adventure he’d supposedly experienced that summer on the beach, but it had been so gossamer-thin that it only took his interlocutor’s obvious lack of interest for it to turn to vapour, like dew); once he had lost all hope of getting it off his chest he felt a sullen fury.
Now I’m going to let you have it! he muttered to himself. You’d like me to listen to your little vapourings but you don’t give a toss for anyone else’s feelings … He hadn’t wanted to listen to the little story of the beach? Right, then he’d find another way to galvanize him. The old woman at the wedding, with her mud-spattered black bag and her remarks, he still had them in the forefront of his mind.
“One evening I went to one of their wedding feasts and stood up to dance with them,” the general broke in.
But the other did not allow him to continue.
“And do you know what I did?” he went on himself. “Despite my grey hair and my missing arm, do you know what I did when we went back to that town a month later? I went alone to the stadium one afternoon, just at the time I knew the players would be training. But the ground was shut, they weren’t doing any training that day after all. I asked to be allowed in all the same, and the groundsman opened the gate for me. The stadium was more dismal and deserted than ever. The graves had been filled in again but you could see where they’d been, like scarred-over wounds all over the surface of the ground. I walked round the edge of the ground till I came to the pillars near the players’ entrance, the spot where the girl always used to stand. And at that moment I felt a despair well up inside me that was so deep, so overwhelming that I thought somehow the life was just going to be crushed out of me by those long, wet, curving tiers, those empty grey stands rising in endless circles up to the sky. Are you listening?”
“Yes, yes, I’m listening,” the general said, while inside what he was saying was: “Bully for you!”
He waited, seething, for the right moment to take his revenge. Old Nice now seemed to him to belong to the ghosts’ punishment battalion. Let us confront him together, he thought, just as we confronted the mud and the rain!
“I was speaking to you about the wedding where I got up to dance … “
This time what interrupted him was a knock at the door.
Which did not prevent him, as he got up to open it, from darting a reproachful look at his colleague. Another telegram.
“They send one missive after another,” he said emphatically.
“They imagine they can sort things out with a telegram! Do you know what an old woman in one of the villages here said to me one night at a wedding feast?” the general asked. “That I’d come here to see how they married off their sons so that I could come back one day and kill them.”
“A terrible thing to say.”
“A terrible thing to say? Ah, you think that’s a terrible thing to say, do you? Then I wonder what you’d think if you knew what happened then!”
“I don’t know,” he conceded. “Better to leave it that way.”
“Drink up, soldier,” the lieutenant-general put in. “Your good health! Here’s wishing you a safe journey home. How I envy you!”
“Thank you, soldier,” the general replied.
He could feel the drink gaining the upper hand. His irritation had subsided, although not completely. He was about to revert to the topic of Nice when, oddly, it was the infected workman he spoke of instead.
“We had a workman who caught an infection,” he said. “Yes, so you told me.”
“He died.”
“Yes, I know,” the lieutenant-general said, looking him straight in the eye, as much as to say that he took this sort of thing in his stride.
“So you told me, so you told me,” the general brooded. But what about you, boring me with your talk of stadiums, and I let you carry on.
The lounge was slowly emptying and the stairs down to the night club were creaking less often, though the music was still wafting up them.
“So where is your reverend father?” the lieutenant-general asked suddenly.
“I’ve no idea. He must be lurking somewhere around the hotel. Answering all these telegrams.”
The other glanced over at him once again with surprise and seemed about to ask for further clarification. But then he changed his mind.
Then the general leaned over his shoulder, as though about to entreat him. After a moment’s hesitation he made up his mind:
“Do me a favour. Stop going on about that stadium of yours … and about blue raincoats and so forth.”
“I give you my word, I promise not to mention the stadium again.”
“One day we heard a song which to begin with we took for a provocation,” the general resumed. “But it was a very ancient song, a love song.”
“Oh really?” the other said with indifference.
“The words went more or less like this: ‘Oh pretty Hanko, beautiful as the dawn, do not walk among the graves, or you’ll bring the dead back to life.’”
“Well, well,” the lieutenant-general said. “Well, well.”
They went on to talk about a great many things after that, but the war and graveyards kept finding their way back into the conversation. Every one of our thoughts has a metal label on it like the graves themselves, the general thought to himself during a pause. A little metal label on a wooden cross, its inscription rusted away, hardly legible any more. A label that grates and squeaks when it’s windy, and it’s almost always windy. Like in that valley where the labels and the crosses were all leaning towards the west. And when we asked why they were all tilted in the same direction like that, the villagers explained it was because of the wind, because the wind always blows from the same direction.
The lounge was almost entirely empty when the next telegram arrived. The general took it from the porter’s hand and ripped it open without even looking to see the place of origin.
He crumpled it into a ball, as he had the previous one, without even reading it through to the end. Then he tossed it into the ashtray.
“You are receiving very mysterious telegrams tonight.” The general did not reply. The other sighed: “I’m afraid of telegrams at night.”
The music could still be heard from below, but the people using the stairs were getting very few and far between. “What time is it?” the general asked.
“Nearlymidnight.”
They drank to something else that the general did not exactly grasp.
Never mind what we drink to. All he’s got to do is stop and think…
For an instant old Nice came back to mind.
You thought you’d got away with it, he mused. You thought you were off the hook. Not true: you’re not to slip out of her hands any more than I could.