Free The General of the Dead Army by Ismaíl Kadaré, Derek Coltman Page A

for a great many reasons, all listed at length one after the other, the honest citizens of our town begged the Duce’s lieutenant-general to reverse his decision to open a licensed brothel here, in the name of the honour and the prosperity of our ancient town with its noble traditions and its origins lost in the mists of antiquity.
    “Next day the letter was despatched.
    “Of course there were some people who didn’t want anything to do with a petition like that, and who disapproved of any kind of letter or request at all being addressed to the occupying powers. But we ignored them. We clung firmly to the hope that something would be done for us. You must remember that this was still the beginning of the war, and there were still many things we hadn’t quite cottoned on to as yet.
    “But of course no heed was paid to our request. A few days later a telegram arrived: “Brothel to be opened for reasons of strategic order stop”. The old postmaster who was the first to read it didn’t grasp the meaning of the message immediately. Indeed, some people said that it was written in one of those coded languages they were always using then, and that always did seem to be incomprehensible. In the telegram were the words “ethnic Albanian” which was deemed to mean the mayor’s fat wife, and so forth. Someone even said they were all wrong to be making a fuss about the opening of a brothel, that it was all to do with the opening of a second front. But such comforting thoughts did not last for long and everything became clear: it wasn’t a second front that was about to be opened but, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a brothel.
    “A few days later further details filtered through. The brothel was to be opened and run by the occupying forces themselves, and foreign women were to be specially brought in.
    “It was the sole subject of conversation in our town. The few men who had been abroad for any length of time pandered to the curiosity of the others, clustering wide-eyed around my tables, by telling them all manner of things on the subject. It wasn’t hard to tell that they often supplemented genuine incidents in their lives with others that were less so. To listen to them talk about Japanese brothels and Portuguese brothels, you would have thought they must know those countries like the backs of their hands, and that they were on first-name terms with every prostitute in the world.
    “Their listeners, especially the ones with grown-up sons, became increasingly worried and kept shaking their heads with more and more anxious looks. And the women, at home, were even more tortured by anxiety, and it was hard to say whether it was for their husbands or for their sons that they were most concerned. The older inhabitants regarded the promised event as the most fateful of omens and were now waiting, their hearts gripped by the darkest forebodings, for an even more terrible punishment to descend upon us from on high. It has to be admitted, of course, that there were some who were delighted, because as you know it takes all sorts to make a world; but no one had the face to actually display his pleasure openly. There were a number of husbands who didn’t get on with their wives, for instance, and also a number who had always been given to skirt-chasing by nature. But above all there were the young men, the ones who weren’t married yet, reading love stories all day long and hanging about all evening with nothing to do. Some people tried to console themselves and reassure everyone else by arguing that from now on the foreign soldiers wouldn’t bother our girls any more because they’d have their own. But people weren’t that easily pacified.
    “At last
they
arrived. They were brought in by a camouflaged army lorry. I can recall the scene as though it was only yesterday. Dusk had just fallen and my café was full. At first I couldn’t understand why so many customers were getting up from their tables and going over to the windows,