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

peering out towards the main square. Then several of them rushed out into the street, and the customers still sitting down began to ask what it was all about. A lot of the tables were suddenly empty. It was the first time so many people had left without paying. So then I went outside myself, unable to restrain my curiosity. People were coming out of the café opposite too, and out of the hunters’ club, and quite a crowd had already formed to watch the scene. The lorry had drawn up just by the town war memorial, opposite the town hall, and
they
had just clambered out of it. Now they were just standing looking around them with astonished eyes. There were six of them, and they seemed tired, numbed from the long journey. The circle of bystanders was gazing at them with popping eyes, as though they were some sort of rare animal, but
they
, as they stood there exchanging comments with one another, merely returned our stares with calm and indifferent smiles. Perhaps they were a little taken aback at finding themselves so unexpectedly in this strange place, all carved out of stone, for it is true that our town does take on a slightly phantasmagorical look in the dusk, with the buttresses of the citadel and the dreaming minarets with their metal-covered spires gleaming in the setting sun.
    “By now the square was filling up with people, in particular with a horde of children, who began hurling a few of the choice foreign words they had picked up from the occupying soldiers at
them
. The grown-ups stood observing them in silence. It was difficult for us at that moment to know exactly what it was we felt in our hearts. The only thing we did realize clearly that evening was that all the things we’d been told about the brothels in Tokyo or Honolulu bore very little relation to what was now meeting our gaze, and that the reality was something very different from all the stories we had been told, something much deeper, sadder, more pitiful.
    “Escorted by a few foreigners, a town hall official, and a gaggle of children, the little flock made its way meekly over to the hotel. It was there that our town’s strange hostesses were to spend the night.
    “Next day
they
were installed in a two-storey house, surrounded by a small garden, right in the heart of the town. A notice giving the hours allotted to civilian and military clients respectively was put up on the door, though none of us actually saw it until later, since for the first few days the street remained as deserted as though it had been struck by the plague. It was particularly awkward for the people who lived along the street. Those who could moved out; those with a back garden would go out the back way onto the adjacent street. Willy nilly the rest had to put up with the misfortune. Only the elderly, especially the entrenched old women, stayed resolutely at home, and sent messages to their friends to say, I can’t come to see you and don’t you come calling on me. They had taken an oath never to leave the house again except in their coffins to be carried to the graveyard. And that’s how it would have been were it not that another coffin came to disrupt matters. But there you are.
    “So the street seemed to be profaned in our eyes. Such was our disgust that later on, when the business was at an end, each time we needed to take this street, it seemed quite alien to us, just as a fallen woman is haunted by the traces of her shame even long after she first fell.
    “Those were dark and worrying days for all of us. Our town had never known any women of ill repute before, and even family scandals caused by jealousy or infidelity had always been rare. And now, so unexpectedly, there was this black spot in the very heart of the town itself. The shock that people had felt when they first heard the news was as nothing to their utter disarray now that the brothel was actually open. The men all began going home very early, and the café was always empty quite early in the evening. If