The General of the Dead Army by Ismaíl Kadaré, Derek Coltman Read Free Book Online

blockade so small a country…”
    “It’s odd!”
    “Exactly. They’ll be hard put to hold out, in the circumstances.”
    “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?”
    The priest continued to chuckle without answering.
    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.”
    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, sometimes 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