“I wanted to ask you,” he said, leaning over close to his companion’s ear. “Have you ever drunk with a priest?”
“A priest? No, not as far as I remember. Though I wouldn’t risk my hand in the fire over it.”
The general could not help looking down at the empty sleeve tucked into the deep tunic pocket.
Yes, he thought, with only one you’d be a fool to risk it.
“Not as far as I remember,” the lieutenant-general said again. The general sat shaking his head for a while.
“Well, that’s life,” he commented meditatively. “One day you’re travelling along in the rain and next day you’re having a drink with a priest. Isn’t that the truth?”
“Oh indeed, indeed.”
“You really agree with me?”
“How could you think otherwise?” “Excuse me. I apologize for doubting you.” “Oh please, please!”
The general, his eyes fixed on the ashtray, raised his hands and shoulders in a great shrug of bewilderment.
T
HE GENERAL HAD IMAGINED
that it was his colleague who was mumbling and was startled to hear himself ask: “What’s that you’re mumbling about?”
“I was remembering the words spoken by someone that wretched night: ‘Rain and death, it’s everywhere.’”
The other gasped in dismay.
“Later on my dear old priest - he has the rank of colonel and is an interpreter as well, but also a lover and heaven knows what else - he told me that the old adage did not end there.” The other grunted.
“‘Rain and death, it’s everywhere, go and look for something else, old fellowOh do stop whistling like that… In other words it’s a bit of a reproach, a warning … All right but I, just like you, can’t do anything else. People go hunting for oil, for chromium, antique statues. We, in our affliction, can do nothing else but this, aren’t I right? We employees of the Standard Death Company. Ha ha ha!”
The other listened open-mouthed. “The whole thing’s turned into a mess,” he continued pensively. “What with the chromium and the oil company getting into the act…” After a pause he added: “It’s past midnight, I think they want to shut the lounge up for the night.”
“Yes, I have that feeling too.”
“Why don’t we go up to my room? We could talk a little more. I feel very happy in your company.”
“Me too.”
They staggered up the hotel stairs, each clutching his bottle. “We mustn’t make a noise,” the general said. “The Albanians go to bed very early.”
“Give me the key then. It looks to me as though your hands are shaking.”
“The important thing is not to make any noise.”
“Well I need noise,” the lieutenant-general said. “I need noise because silence terrifies me. This battle we’re fighting, it’s silent like a silent film. I’d rather hear the guns thundering. But I’m talking like one of your people from a play, aren’t I?”
“Shh! Someone’s coughing at us.”
“Give me your key. Yes, a silent battle! A battle between dead men!”
“Do come in, please. Sit down. I’m very happy to see you here like this.”
“Yes, I am too. Being here with you. Happy, I mean.”
Avast spread of death, the general brooded.
They sat down on opposite sides of the table and gazed at one another affectionately. The general filled the glasses.
“We are just two migrating birds, sitting at this table drinking raki and cognac,” the lieutenant-general said with deep emotion.
The general nodded. They sat there for a while without speaking.
“We had a row over the sack,” the general said at last, forcing his eyebrows into a frown. He began staring at his companion as though he were trying to remember something. Then, in a confidential murmur, he added: “I pushed him over the edge.”
“But you just said the priest was in his room!”
“No, I mean the sack,” the general said. “Not the priest.”
“Ah, I understand. Of course.”
“He didn’t want me to throw the sack in the water,” the general went on, “but I wanted to get rid of those bones. At all costs, you realize?”
“Quite right. After all what possible importance can a sack have?” the lieutenant-general said, and took a puff at his cigarette. “Yes, but you just try telling him that. He won’t listen.”
“And that’s why you pushed him over the edge?”
“No, not him, the sack.”
“Ah! I beg your pardon.”
There was once a car and a lorry driving along in the rain, the general thought. Then, aloud, he began:
“There was once a car and a lorry driving along in the rain …”
“What? What did you say?” the other asked. “Are you in military transport yourself?”
“No. It’s the beginning of the second story I shall tell my little grand-daughter.”
“Ah. You collect stories then?”
“Ofcourse.”
“Just as I thought. Now I have always been very interested in where fables come from.”
“That’s a very important problem.”
“Insoluble!”
“Ungraspable, I’d say.”
“It’s very good of you to admit it.”
“Enough talk!” the lieutenant-general said in a peremptory tone.
The general stared at him in stupefaction, but his mind soon wandered off elsewhere.
“Do you know the song ‘When the wild geese fly away’?” he asked. “One night I had a strange dream. I dreamed I saw a cemetery in the shape of a V flying through the sky.”
“What fun!”
The general stared at him again.
“I have four priests among my dead,” he said then. “Really? I haven’t a single one,” the other said with a grieved air. “You haven’t even got a whore.”
“No, I haven’t a whore either.”
“Don’t let it upset you. You might still find one.”
“Yes, perhaps I might,” the lieutenant-general murmured. “You find all sorts of things under the ground. Where is your bathroom?”
“Through that door.”
The general sat alone at the table for a long while. At last the other returned.
“Once, in a valley, we found mule bones all mixed up with the remains of our soldiers,” he said. “One of our reprisal battalions.”
The lieutenant-general was having difficulty enunciating his words, and drunkenness had drained the colour from his face.
“Incompetent officers! I am here to sweep up the débris of your defeats!” the general announced.
“We mustn’t be too hard on them. They didn’t have an easy job.”
“Ours was harder.”
“Possibly.”
“Report on Exhumation Number 104, Type B,” the general muttered.
They sat silent for a moment.
“Mule bones are very different from human bones. Anybody at all could tell the difference. At a glance.”
“Of course they could. I believe the human skeleton is made up of five hundred and seven bones.”
“That isn’t true, my friend,” the lieutenant-general said, his mood suddenly dark. “It isn’t always true anyway. Take me, for example. I have less than that.”
“It’s not possible.”
“But it’s a fact,” the other insisted hoarsely. “I have quite a number of bones less. I am an invalid, a cripple.”
“Now now,” the general said consolingly, “you mustn’t upset yourselflike that.”
“I am a cripple,” the other went on. “I can see you don’t believe me, but I intend to prove it to you here and now.”
He began trying to remove his tunic with his one hand; but the general seized him by the shoulders.
“There’s no need, my friend, there’s no need! I believe you, I really believe you. And I beg your forgiveness. I can’t say how sorry I am. I am very, very much to blame. Yes, I have behaved quite inexcusably.”
“I have to show it to you. To everyone who doesn’t believe it.
I must show it to you here and now.”
“Ssh!” the general said. “I think someone is knocking.” They were silent. There was another knock at the door. “Who can it be? At this hour?”
“I don’t like it, hearing knocks on a door like that in the middle of the night,” the lieutenant-general said. “That’s what the knocks sounded like on my door that night, when the urgent call came for me to go to the front. Rat! tat! tat! Then when I came home I couldn’t open the door. It was the first time I’d tried it with only one hand.” The general staggered over and pulled open the door.
It was the porter, with another telegram. “You seem very mysterious tonight,” the lieutenant-general said. “All these telegrams in the night can’t be a good sign.”
“It’s them again,” the general said. “They seem very upset.”
The white telephones are ringing away over there at this very moment, he thought. Hello? Hello? Hello? They are all telephoning one another, rushing from house to house like mad creatures, visiting one another, chattering to one another … And vaguely he tried to picture them all, all gathered together at the colonel’s house, busy ringing all their friends, the old woman appearing at the top of the stairs with her hands stretched out to make a cross, Betty half out of bed in a state of shock, all of them muttering: “That wretched man, he still hasn’t found him. What a wretched fellow!”
I’m not a wretched fellow, Betty! he told her in his mind, and then out loud:
“They’re not going to get much sleep tonight.”
“What is it they want?” the lieutenant-general asked.
“The sack.”
“I would advise you to give it to them and have done with it. Be very careful!”
Oh arseholes! the general thought to himself.
He crumpled the telegram up into a ball and threw it onto the floor.
“You know something?” he said. “I’m rather afraid that priest of mine is a spy.”
“It’s quite possible. I wouldn’t risk my hand in the fire over it though.”
They were silent for a long while. Beyond the blinds it was possible to discern a whitish, murky glimmer. “Look, dawn’s breaking,” the general said. They could hear the gentle sound of rain falling on the balcony outside.
“Telegrams make me afraid,” the lieutenant-general said with a slightly wild look. “There’s always something unpleasant in them, something secret. And then other things are left out. I remember once, at the front, one of the staff officers got a telegram from one of his friends who’d been dead for ages.”
“Oh my friend, what a sad story. What a terrible story!”
“Ssh!” the lieutenant-general said. “Do you hear?”
“What? Hear what?”
“Listen! Can’t you hear anything?”
The general tilted his head and listened. “Rain!”
“No, not that.”
In the distance, far in the distance, an indistinct, rhythmical noise could be heard. Then voices, peremptory, abrupt, followed once more by just the sound of the rain. “What can it be?”
“We must go out onto the balcony,” the general said, and stood up.
As soon as they opened the french window the cold, wet night air froze their faces, and the distant, rhythmical noise became much clearer.
They both went out onto the balcony. A fine, soft rain was falling. Even the boulevard looked pale and grey under the cold neon street lights, and the park, facing the hotel, was no more than a black and ominous mass.
“That way,” the lieutenant-general murmured, his face paler than ever now. “Look!”
The general turned his head, then started. At the far end of the boulevard, near the University, big, dark squares were advancing towards them.
The heavy tramp of feet could now be more clearly distinguished, and the orders, sudden and brief, carried icily through the darkness of the night.
The two generals remained there, leaning on the balustrade of the balcony, eyes fixed on the advancing shapes. As the dark squares neared the bridge they could make out the cold reflections on the wet helmets and bayonets, the long columns of soldiers, the officers with drawn swords, and the gaps between companies and battalions. The earth shook under the heavy boots, and the curt cries of command rang out like bayonets clashing.
The formations kept coming; the whole boulevard was now teeming with soldiers, and the street lamps lining the roadway were reflected to infinity on the wet, shiny helmets, looking as cold and mysterious as a world going putrid.
“An army,” the lieutenant-general said. “What’s going on?”
“It’s their army. They must be rehearsing for tomorrow’s parade.”
“For their Liberation Day?”
“Yes, of course.”
Now there was a sound like muffled thunder in the distance. “The tanks!” the general said.
And the tanks duly appeared beyond the bridge, massive and black, their gun barrels aimed into the night.
The boulevard was now all troops, metal, marching feet, thundering engines, abrupt commands, and all of it, as in a single body, streaming relentlessly on towards Skanderburg Square.
When the last formation had disappeared behind the government buildings and the boulevard was once more empty, lying silent and pale beneath the street lights again as though after a night without sleep, they went back into the room.
“It was a whole army, out there.”
“Yes, an entire army.”
“I’m cold.”
“We’re soaked through.”
“Drink, general, otherwise you’ll catch cold.” The cold had made them both a little more lucid. The general raised his head.
“You saw them out there, marching by?”
“I did.”
“They make me think of my own army. They make me wonder how my soldiers would look, marching past in their blue bags with their black edgings.”
“It would be even more difficult for me,” the one-armed general said. “Mine are really only a rabble. How would I even recognize them, I wonder?”
“When you come before this vast stretch of death,” the general mused. He wondered what lay behind this mute terror.
“When you come before this vast stretch of death,” he said out loud.
“What?”
The general took his head in both hands, in an attitude that was quite unlike him, a posture totally alien to him, more than alien, as though its origin lay in the world of ancient crones.
No, he muttered to himself.
He could not stomach this playing with words blended with a sort of funereal music.
When you reach the place where … look for my son … look for my boy. In a haze he saw Countess Z. and old Nice deep in conversation. Give me back my son, foreign woman … Well have him, then, Countess. Take him home. He was alone between the two of them.