...of rancour

I don’t know what army you are part of, because I’ve never been able to recognise uniforms, and I’m too old now to start, but you are a foreigner and you belong to one of those armies that killed my family. That’s clear enough. To judge by your insignia, invading people is your trade and you are one of those who broke my life, who turned me into the unhappy woman I am, an old woman who has come to a wedding feast that is nothing to do with her and sits in a corner mumbling like this. No one can hear what I am saying because everyone here is merry and I don’t want to spoil the joy of their feast. And it is precisely because I don’t want to spoil anyone’s joy that I am staying here in my corner cursing you between my teeth, quietly, oh very quietly, so that no one will hear. I should like to know what made you come here to this wedding feast, and why your legs did not give way under you before they brought you here. You are sitting there, at that table, and laughing like an idiot child. Get up, can’t you, throw your coat over your shoulders, go back through the rain to where you came from! Can’t you understand that you are not wanted here, accursed man?
The women were still singing. The general felt a warm breath of tender emotion flooding through his breast. He had the sensation of being laved in a delightful bath of sounds and light. And the waves of sound and light pouring over him like the waters of a healing spring were warming him, purifying his body of all that graveyard mud, that foul mud with its unmistakable odour of putrefaction and of death.
Now that his first dazed reaction had passed, the general had regained all his good humour. He felt he wanted to talk, to keep himself from thinking with a flow of words. He tried to catch the eye of the priest, who was sitting one place away down the table on the other side. He was obviously in a state of great unease.
The general leaned over to him.
“You see, it’s all perfectly all right.”
The priest did not answer.
The general stiffened. He could feel the glances of the people around him falling on him like silent arrows. They were falling on his pockets, on his epaulettes, and occasionally, very occasionally, on his eyes; the dark, heavy arrows of men, and the nimble, glittering, uncertain arrows of the young girls.
(Like a wounded and indomitable bird, you will fly on…)
“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” he said, addressing himself once again to the priest.
But the priest did not reply. He merely looked at the general as though to say “Possibly”, then turned his eyes away again.
“These people are showing us respect,” the general said.
“Death commands respect everywhere.”
“Death…? I don’t think it’s written on our faces,” the general retorted. He tried to smile, but failed. “It’s a long time since the war was over. The past is forgotten. I am certain that no one at this wedding has a thought for past enmities.”
The priest did not speak. The general decided to cease addressing him - and yet, somehow, a piece of his companion’s cassock, a black patch, seemed to stay dancing in front of his eyes.
The priest obviously feels unwanted, he thought to himself. And wouldn’t that mean that I was too? It’s very difficult to say. But it’s done now. Here we are. Wanted or not wanted, there is no way of leaving. It would be easier to retreat under machine-gun fire than to stand up now, throw our coats over our shoulders, and walk out into the rain.
You know quite well you’re not wanted here. You can feel there’s someone at this feast who is cursing you; and a mother’s curse is never voiced in vain. Despite the respect they are showing you, you know well enough that you should never have set foot in this place. You are trying to persuade yourself it isn’t so, but it’s no good, is it? Your hand trembles as you raise your glass, and the shadows that pass your eyes betray the terror that you feel!

[The General of the Dead Army, Kadare, I.]