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September Issue |
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Resources |
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The General of the Dead Army
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18526 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
9,596 Words |
| Author
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Ismail Kadare
From the General of the Dead Army, by Ismail Kadere. Published
by New Amsterdam Books, 1991, by arrangement with Editions
Albin Michel, Paris. |
Rain and flakes of snow were falling simultaneously on the foreign soil. The concrete runway, the airport building, the soldiers guarding them were all soaking wet. The plain and the surrounding hills were covered in melting snow and the water had made the black asphalt of the road shine. At any other time of year this monotonous rain might have been thought a dismal coincidence. But the general was not really surprised by it. He had come to Albania to search for the remains of his country's soldiers killed in various parts of Albania during the last world war and to supervise their repatriation. Negotiations between the two governments had begun the spring before, but the final contracts had not been signed until the end of August, just when the first grey days normally put in an appearance. Now it was autumn. And autumn, the general was aware, was the rainy season. Before leaving, he had looked up the country's climate. This time of year, he had discovered, was usually damp and rainy. But, even if his handbook had told him that the autumns in Albania were ordinarily dry and sunny, he would still not have found this rain untoward. Quite the reverse. He had always felt in fact that his mission somehow required bad weather as a precondition of its success. Perhaps the reading matter he had brought with him and the films that kept flashing through his brain were contributory factors to his melancholy, but the plane journey and the sullen weather had quite certainly accentuated it.
He had spent much of the journey gazing out of the plane window at the menacing mountains. He felt that one of their sharp peaks was bound to rip open the plane's belly at any moment. Jagged rock on every side. Sinister escarpments sliding swiftly back into the mist. At the bottoms of those abysses and on those abrupt slopes, beneath the rain, lay the army he had come to unearth. Now that he was seeing it for the first time, this foreign land, he was suddenly much more clearly aware of the vague fear that had always begun coalescing inside him whenever he tried to confront the feeling of unreality that seemed bound up with his mission. The army was there, below him, outside time, frozen, petrified, covered with earth. It was his mission to draw it up from the mud. And when he contemplated that task, it made him afraid. It was a mission that exceeded the bounds of nature, a mission in which there must be something blind, something deaf, something deeply absurd. A mission that bore unforeseeable consequences in its womb.
The land that had at last come into view, below him, far from inspiring him with a certain feeling of security--simply because of its reality--had on the contrary served to increase his apprehension. It had merely added its own indifference to the indifference of the dead. But it was not only indifference, it was something more than that. Those racing peaks just visible through the mist, those contours seemingly torn into jaggedness by grief, expressed nothing but hostility.
For a few moments he felt that the accomplishment of his mission was impossibility. Then he tried to pull himself together. He tried to neutralize the
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