In Fletë, he dashed breathless into the caravanserai before the king’s escort, and when he opened the umbrella he was almost caught by the commander of the provisional army base there, Zhivoyin ‘Eiffel’ Pavlovich. In Fushë-Arrëz, the king was received by a dozen of Esad Pasha’s soldiers, and several of the Albanians rubbed their eyes when the doctor’s truly remarkable umbrella accidentally came open and the thirty kilos of medical supplies dropped out. The king’s group reached the town of Leshë on 5 December 1915 at around eleven, and it was only thanks to Captain Murat Zmiyanovich that the secret was not discovered. In Shëngjin and Fushë-Krujë the medicines were ‘unpacked’ without incident, and finally the little convoy arrived in Tirana.
In the old Italian hotel where the king’s suite was located, Dr Simonovich opened the umbrella as before, not suspecting anything. No, he couldn’t have noticed that his wondrous ‘carry brolly’ had become lighter on the way to their final destination or that the load was different in some way; after all, it was condensed into a spot the size of a nugget of gold. He was therefore most surprised to find completely different medicines when he opened it. Instead of heavy little red-glass jars, long syringes, needles arranged in tins and crystalline blocks of various salts, the doctor saw neatly ordered phials in unusual transparent sheets, and tiny little jars and syringes made of some kind of lightweight, transparent glass. He was frightened: he closed the umbrella and opened it again. The new medicines were still there — they had truly replaced the old ones. What should he do with them? With doctorly discernment he opened one phial and sniffed at the powder inside (the smell was reminiscent of mould), he also examined the minuscule syringes, but he was most amazed by the hair-fine needles neatly ordered in a flexible covering of another kind of transparent material unknown to him.
Maybe these medicines were far more effective than those he had taken along with him; perhaps they would be better for treating old King Peter’s ailments, but Dr Simonovich had no way of testing them, so he disposed of them without any pangs of conscience. Through various medical connections in Tirana he was able to reacquire the thirty kilos of conventional medicines and medical supplies. He didn’t say a word to the king. He no longer hid the medicines in his umbrella, nor did he ever find out that he had discarded valuable antibiotics, medicines for high blood pressure, antidepressants, powerful analgesics and a small supply of aspirin.
Would a doctor on the opposite side in the war, Heinrich Aufschneider, have been able to recognize these medicines? Probably not, and not only due to him being a Viennese psychoanalyst, but because he was also a child of his age. He was a sergeant in the medical corps of the Austro-Hungarian army. In the thirteen days of the first occupation of Belgrade in 1914, he too was a guest at Gavra Crnogorchevich’s ‘friendly Serbian house’. He was a soldier who had not yet seen a downfall — his own and others’ — but still had the need to soothe his conscience and console himself by pretending to believe he was entering relationships with Gavra Crnogorchevich’s ‘daughters’ there in occupied Serbia. He remembered that house well: the entrance was through a pigsty, and then there was an open sewer to be jumped; but when the prospective visitor opened the door, his astonished eyes were met with the spectacle of a real, slicked-up ‘diplomatic club’, with a number of thick-legged women whom the head of the household openly kissed and called ‘my daughters’. This psychoanalyst got to know his host Gavra well in the space of those thirteen days in 1914: he was a man who seemed cruel and crude on the outside, and inside fatalistically certain that business would soon be over and he would meet a tragic end.
He was the first of the ‘dead-end people’, as Dr Aufschneider later came to call his protégés. When he entered Belgrade again one year later, in 1915, the psychoanalyst saw many dead-end people. He was given the task of accompanying a priest on his final visits to men sentenced to death, and this was a totally new experience for the psychoanalyst. He decided to write a paper about it and send it to the inner circle of psychoanalysts. The men condemned to death, he noticed, reduced their whole life to the few days remaining before the noose and began to live it like a new, three-day existence in which they had an urge to do something they had never done in their ordinary life, unbounded by the death sentence. Men who had never learnt to read asked for books or newspapers; others started painting; some took up smoking; others used the time to swear about the kaiser all day long; others again refused food and prepared themselves to leave for the afterlife on an empty stomach — and all of them were convinced they could do what came into their heads in those three or four days because nothing worse than the death penalty could happen to them.
A few weeks later, the doctor gave his work in progress the title ‘The Psychology of the Man Sentenced to Death’. He completed it with ease and provided several dozen examples of men hung in Belgrade. He added photographs of the men on death row and was convinced he had to show the paper to the other psychoanalysts. Although he had applied for and received several days’ leave, he didn’t set off straight away because the entire army had to wait for Kaiser Wilhelm, who was coming to take a walk in Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress — the first German ruler since Barbarossa to glance down at the mouth of the Sava into the Danube beneath windy and spiteful Belgrade.
As soon as the kaiser was gone again, the doctor of the men sentenced to death immediately packed and boarded the first hospital train departing Belgrade railway station for the north. Setting off on this trip to find his fellow psychoanalysts, one after another, was to be the beginning of Dr Heinrich Aufschneider’s personal drama. There would be no such story to tell if the doctor had not felt a sense of guilt deep in the dregs of his soul and if he had not been far more frightened than his men on death row. That was nothing out of the ordinary, any psychoanalyst could have told him, but what was about to happen on his peregrination through wartime Europe would become the subject of a paper written after the Great War by one of Freud’s closest collaborators, Karl Abraham, albeit only as an extension of an earlier article from the ‘totemic phase’ of 1913.
The psychoanalyst Aufschneider was to become the centre of a tragic case of totemic identification. But what tormented the Vienna psychoanalyst so much that made him totemistically identify with death? Back in 1913, the psychoanalysis congress was held in Basel and each of the delegates of this mortally ill movement had to decide whom to vote for: Freud or Jung. Aufschneider gave his vote to the ‘disobedient son Jung’, but afterwards changed his mind. He never forgave himself for rising up against ‘father Freud’, however briefly, and for temporarily trusting Jung and allowing himself to be enchanted like an impressionable youth. He sought an appointment with the professor and Freud forgave him, but did Heinrich Aufschneider forgive himself?
The Great War came and the artillery barrage drowned out all thoughts, except perhaps those we conceal deep inside. But as soon as the operations on the Balkan Front ended, Aufschneider applied for leave, grabbed his paper and set off on his journey — a fatal voyage he should never have made. Later everything would be documented in detail. To begin with, he took ‘The Psychology of the Man Sentenced to Death’ to show to Freud’s close associate, Sándor Ferenczi. Having totemistically identified with his guilt, and now inducing diseases in himself, Aufschneider suffered a perforation of the duodenum while visiting Ferenczi among the Hungarian hussars. He agonized and vomited and was miserable, but he put up with the terrible pain and continued his pilgrimage: to see the next member of Freud’s committee, Max Eitingon. There it was established that he had a chronic inflammation of the prostate gland (with suspicion of cancer) and was put to bed on doctor’s orders. But the patient signed his own discharge papers and made it clear to Eitingon and the other doctors that he had to continue his journey. So it was that Aufschneider ‘found his way’ — as Freud’s third confidant, Karl Abraham, wrote with a dash of unpsychoanalytical pathos — to see him at the military hospital in Olsztyn, East Prussia. Here the patient ought to have rested
. Dr Abraham immediately confirmed the existing ailments and began conducting psychotherapy on him, suspecting from the start that these were totemic diseases, which a patient comes down with of their own, hidden volition. But the diseases were genuine and Dr Abraham trembled with excitement at the possibility of discovering a new link in the chain of psychological possibilities of a patient burdened by guilt; it would be the first recorded clinical case of someone falling ill of their own accord.
He told none of this to his colleague and patient Aufschneider but tried to keep him in bed and on his analyst’s couch for as long as possible. Once he had documented two diseases — a perforation of the duodenum (he termed it ‘Ferenczi’s disease’) and chronic prostatitis (‘Eitingon’s disease) — and then diagnosed a third, cirrhosis of the liver, which the patient had developed while visiting him (‘Abraham’s disease’), the patient was allowed to proceed on his journey under the condition that he be escorted. One of Abraham’s assistants followed him closely, and it is thanks to him that we have a report on Aufschneider’s last days.
After leaving East Prussia, on the way to his final destination, Vienna, the patient with three diseases had to stop off in Kraków, where the local soldiers’ newspaper was edited by the fourth member of the committee who wore Freud’s ring: Otto Rank. The patient didn’t justify himself or make any excuses in front of Rank either, which further confirmed the subconscious basis of his self-induced illnesses. Aufschneider, who by now was exhausted, told Rank that he had come to Kraków to show him his paper ‘The Psychology of the Man Sentenced to Death’. There, in the old Polish capital, he soon came down with a fourth disease: a stomach ulcer (‘Rank’s disease’). How he managed to stay on two legs is known only to the deep currents of the psyche, which is capable of holding us upright until our will completely fails.
The patient therefore hastened to continue his journey on from Kraków. He was obliged to move on, and the last station was known to all: Vienna, where the icy and ever gloomier Dr Freud was waiting. Still, the father of psychoanalysis cordially received his young colleague. Why father Sigmund and daughter Anna weren’t surprised at the newcomer’s arrival became clear: the reason for the Freud’s warm and almost fraternal reception lay in the wartime letters which had overtaken the patient. By the time he saw his ‘runaway son’, Freud had already received detailed reports from Ferenczi, Eitingon and Rank, as well as a complete case history on the patient written by Dr Abraham at the hospital in Olsztyn. The father of psychoanalysis naturally took an interest, which is why he immediately accepted the patient into his cold house. It bemused Aufschneider — why not use that expression — that Freud read his paper and even made suggestions in his own hand in the margins, but actually he was just observing the patient’s condition. He waited maybe a week, two at the most, and then the pilgrim developed a toothache: first in one tooth, then in another, and finally the whole jaw. Before long, it was established that poor Dr Aufschneider had contracted cancer of the jaw beneath his lower right molar (‘Freud’s pernicious disease’).
The end came swiftly and the psychoanalyst did not live to see the New Year 1916. After the Great War, his pilgrimage became the cornerstone of a study entitled ‘The Psychology of the Wartime Patient’, which Dr Freud only let Dr Abraham have and take credit for after much wrangling, with the former only allowing Freud to add a few words as an intimate dedication at the top. But that was not until much later, after the Great War had finally ended.
On the eve of 1916, neither Abraham nor Freud knew if they would live to see the next year, and nor did Father Donovan, who had just lost a soldier on New Year’s Eve. He didn’t hearten the young man this time and urge him to grab the pole. The boy arrived with an enormous, gaping hole in his stomach and it was a miracle that the chaplain managed to confess him at all. That wasn’t the first time he lost a soldier, but it was New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake. That death at the turn of the year was a particularly hard blow for him. He came out of the wooden dugout in the trench of the Scottish 92nd Division with cap in hand and looked up into the sky. Never before had he felt he could see so much sky and so many stars with one gaze.
Hans-Dieter Huis didn’t sing for the New Year 1916, but he would again soon — no doubt about it.
Guillaume Apollinaire hadn’t found a new sweetheart by the time the New Year came around.
Stefan Holm didn’t live to see the New Year 1916. Cholera, which he first felt as mild pain in the lower abdomen, developed so rapidly that they barely managed to lay him in bed. He died in an improvised field hospital not far from the trenches. The patients lay densely packed in that that log cabin, one beside the other, like galley slaves chained to the oars. Some men shook as they lay there wrapped in dirty blankets, others ate without appetite, others vomited. With death-like, grey faces and large, serious eyes, they just waited to die. They were no longer soldiers or men, but monstrous creatures, diseased and miserable, who were now paying the price for having survived the combat. Stefan was no different. His last words were: ‘Send my cap to Warsaw.’ But no one knew why he said that, so they sent it to Heidelberg instead.
Boris Dmitrievich Rizanov and two of his comrades staged a spectacular breakout from a German labour camp, which the newspaper Russkoye Slovo later wrote about. They cut away wooden boards to make a nutshell of a boat and rowed it with their shovels, and in this way they crossed the Little Belt into the Baltic Sea. From the island of Bågø in neutral Denmark the fugitives were sent to Assens, from where they returned via Sweden to Russia.
Field Marshal Boroevich von Boina was caressed by the southern sun for the whole of the last day of 1915, and he wore one uniform until midnight and the other after midnight. No one noticed him change identical coats or saw his left hand shake his right as he wished himself a happy new 1916.
Old Libion and Old Combes saw in the New Year 1916 in the company of prostitutes, lame artists and cocky jugglers from the provinces. The spigots of the newly arrived barrels of sour wine from Touraine were knocked out one after another amidst universal good cheer.
On that New Year’s Eve, Jean Cocteau ceremoniously opened his last tin of bogus ‘Madagascar’ beef. It was in fact crabmeat, which melted in his mouth and mingled with the words he spoke to himself: ‘I must find that seedy little Kiki de Montparnasse again. Each of her tins is well worth its money.’
Lilian Schmidt sang at another Berlin variety show to welcome in the New Year. Nothing was further from her mind now than singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’; instead, her rich voice glided down to disappointed, alto depths to sing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’.
Fritz Haber didn’t even notice that it was New Year’s Eve. In 1915, he had lost his wife Clara Immerwahr, but much work lay ahead in the New Year: improving the cylinders for releasing the gas, better training the soldiers, and devising a totally new way of mass poisoning with the aid of the air force. No, he had no time to think that the New Year replaces the old, but he was already preparing to take stock of his life, without knowing that it would cost him dearly.
On New Year’s Eve, Lucien Guirand de Scevola came up with a way of combining all his pre-war talents and became the first commander of the French camouflage company.
Submarine commander Walther Schwieger saw in the New Year 1916 as befitted him — under water, with his serpents, megalodons and giant octopuses. Singing was heard in the New Year’s night; probably that of the crew. Or was it?
The soldier Giorgio de Chirico continued to paint metaphysical canvases, and during the long New Year’s night he thanked God that there was no trace of his imitator, Karlo Rota.
The day 1915 was seen out and the New Year 1916 was welcomed in, Amanda Henze became the happiest and the most unhappy mother in the world. Her son Hans Henze sat down at the piano in a small auditorium and gave a perfect rendition of all the shades and nuances of Chopin’s Berceuse (Lullaby) with his right hand, naturally without the base melody, because he couldn’t play the piano with his left hand, wh
ich could only write poetry in French.
Thirteen days later, by the old calendar, the Sukhomlinovs saw in the New Year 1916. They saw out the old year under house arrest at their residence in Petrograd. As former minister of war, Sukhomlinov first tried unsuccessfully to bribe the sentries to procure him a bottle of Georgian cognac; afterwards he tried to trick his Lady Macbeth into letting him partake of the white lushness of her body, from the stern or the prow; but since he was successful at neither, he fell asleep disgruntled and saw in the New Year in his dreams.
The grand duke awaited the advent of the New Year at his headquarters in Tbilisi, with Russian Cossacks. He felt caged. The men around him were crude — real killers who had only just wiped the blood from their sabres, fists and fur hats for that one night. But this was the Caucasus, so it was with subjects such as these that the viceroy saw in the New Year.
The neurosurgeon Sergei Chestukhin was demobilized at the end of 1915 and sent back to Petrograd. Ever more soldiers were being killed by Haber’s gas at the front, so the surgeon had more work back at his clinic from where he had set off for the war. Sergei and Liza Chestukhin were therefore reunited on New Year’s Eve 1916. Or were they? Liza, as if abandoned, in the corner. Sergei in the doorway. Liza smiling. Sergei serious. Liza swung her copper hair and waved her hand like a child wanting to get away from the smoke of a cigar. Sergei continued smoking cigars of black tobacco. Marusya remembered that image from the previous New Year’s Eve.
Mrs Lir didn’t live to see 1916. She died in an artillery barrage in Nish shortly before the Bulgarians marched into the city. She lived her last moments in the street amid a hectic mass of people and animals. Men whipped oxen, while bristly Mangalitza pigs squeezed past their legs, grunting in distress. Impoverished peasants hurried past her, as well as gypsies with their tents, officers with their medals, limping soldiers wrapped in rags and wartime purveyors clenching bags under their arms. They were all leaving for somewhere. Mrs Lir was going somewhere too, but beyond the confines of this world.
The Great War Page 22
