The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  Every evening was the same. When alcohol had well irrigated the dry human soul, Ilya Ehrenburg got up.

  ‘Comrades, comrades,’ he yelled, and stopped. He swayed and had to hold on to the table. The music played a fanfare. ‘We are all socialists because we want this horrible war to end as soon as possible. (‘Oho,’ someone heckled over at the right.) But when it’s over, what do we want? The same sort of system? To keep fattening tsars and presidents? No! We’ll build a new society, where every working man will have the same rights as a ruler. (Shouts of ‘Not in France!’ and ‘Not in Germany!’) But in Russia, yes! There, comrades, the worker will wear a new pair of shoes every day. We’ll have so many that we’ll throw them away in the evening. A new model every day — that will be the slogan. (Shouts of ‘Tell us another one!’) And the old shoes? What shall we do with them? We’ll send them to the poor countries of Asia, and in a year or two we’ll have shod all of China and Indo-China, and Mongolia as well. That’s right, comrades.’

  The next evening, the same again. Comrade Ilya once more:

  ‘Comrades, a new story. Quiet please, a new story. In Russia, comrades, everyone will first of all have a car, and when it goes out of fashion they’ll have their own personal dirigible. That’s right: di-ri-gi-ble! a new Zeppelin per family every five-year plan. All the balloons, of course, will belong to the State and be allotted for individual use, and they won’t be given to functionaries first but to the ordinary, rank-and-file worker. There will be so many of them that highways will have to be built in the sky. After his strenuous day of labour, every working man will enter his airship and shoot up into the blue. We’ll see hundreds of them on the horizon in the twilight. Those will be the most beautiful sunsets of Europe.’

  Shouts from the crowd: ‘Come off it!’, while others yelled: ‘Encore, encore!’

  Ilya Ehrenburg, however, plumped back down on his chair like a sack of ship’s refuse to be thrown overboard. That was the end of his stories for that evening, but more days and new evenings were to come, and each would be the same; all except one, when something quite unexpected happened, although, truth be told, it only spoiled the mood of the gathering very briefly.

  As the Russian circle in the café grew ever louder that day in the late Indian summer, and as the guests asked them for more of the colourful and cheerful stories about their classless society, a vagabond came in. He looked like a drunkard, but one untypical of carefree Geneva. He wore a visor cap pulled down to his nose and had grey, sunken cheeks as if he had risen from the grave. Ilya Ehrenburg got up. He raised his finger into the air like a lightning rod and was ready to start, but the newcomer spoke in a quiet, yet sufficiently clear voice and everyone heard him:

  ‘There will be no new shoes or Zeppelins in socialist Russia. Everyone will be poor and live in fear. They will dream of sugar but sweeten their tea with saccharin until they get sick of it and then sweeten their tea with strychnine one morning. This comrade here, Vladimir Ilich, who will be the first president of the Presidium, will be replaced by a steely comrade from Georgia, and the repression will begin. The hanging judge Andrei Vyshinsky will say: “I noticed in the records of the investigation that you went so far as to deny any subversive activity.” One of the thousands of accused, Muralov, will reply: “I think there are three things which made me deny it. The first is my character. I am very excitable and easily get offended. When I was arrested, I lost my temper. The second reason is my attachment to Trotsky.”

  Silence reigned in the café for a moment, then one guest laughed at a table at the back, followed by another and yet one more. A moment later, the whole café resounded with laughter, and rosy pictures of a classless society were called for once more. Finally Ilya Ehrenburg spoke, and first he said with earnest:

  ‘I will not permit anyone to insult Comrade Trotsky here. He is the first among us revolutionaries and socialists.’ He paused, laughed as if nothing had happened, and began his fairy tale: ‘A collision of dirigibles was only just avoided in the open sky over Russia. Congestion in the socialist heavens was the cause. That was to be the day when traffic rules were established — like those on the ground, only in the air. Afterwards, many said it would be better to return to earth and for everyone to borrow a tram from the state.’

  This elated story created the noisiest atmosphere in any of Geneva’s cafés. But, as with death, the range of this hubbub was limited, too. Quiet girls strolled along the cobblestone streets by café Leman, hoping for a gallant for the evening, and the wind from the lake had turned cold and announced the end of a short Swiss Indian summer. If we step back a little further from the noisy café where socialist dreams are told, the prevalent silence and mistrust are capable of killing all mirth.

  One previously famous and also voluble married couple was now living out its lean days under house arrest. Governor-general Sukhomlinov, the former expert on cavalry, which irrevocably lost its importance for the Great War in 1916, was confined to his own four walls. The glory days of this red-headed and red-moustached seducer from the Solovtsov Theatre were long since past. His Katenka, the former consort of the Austrian spy Altschuler, spent these dismal days at his side.

  Never again, she swore to herself, would she lead a boring, provincial life like with her first husband, the landowner Butovich, so even now she continued to play a ridiculous spy role. She looked through all the drawers, defined the value of every document which was no longer of any importance, and now began to spy on her own husband because she believed that his sequence of habits would be of great use for the Austrians when her Sukhomlinov returned to a senior position in the Russian army. But Vladimir Alexandrovich Sukhomlinov no longer had any important habits, and Katenka began to keep a truly pointless diary. The entry for 12 October 1916 read: ‘Last night, he snored until half past two. Then he rolled onto his back and started to speak. I wrote down everything, word for word. Here’s what he said: “Horses are racing across the steppe. They come upon a river. They go in, and they start to drown. Only their muzzles are above the water. ‘Your horses have drowned,’ one of the men says to me.”’ the next day’s entry read: ‘For the first time in three weeks he’s finally changed his trunks, thank God. He put on socks, as well as garters to hold them up, as if he was about to go out among people. He combed his moustache — that is of great importance.’ And the next: ‘He snored again but didn’t say anything in his sleep’, and the following . . . etc.

  But there is no point here in going through all the entries in Yekaterina Sukhomlinova’s diary. What we have heard already is quite sufficient to make friends and enemies want to forget them both. History, and this novel, only take notice of what is important. For that, we must move deeper into Asia, where another formerly great man was trying to forget his sharp-toothed dreams. Ousted and sent to distant Tbilisi with the title of viceroy, the ‘Grand Duke’ Nicholas Nikolaevich suddenly noticed that his fingers were becoming hard and rigid. He stared at his nails, which were going from a normal, pinkish colour to dark blue, then coppery red, and finally to a golden hue. One after another: the nails on thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger and little finger of both hands. He looked like an Indian guru with those golden and now rather long nails. He raised his hands into the air and examined them as if he was in a nail studio. It all seemed not to worry him, until he noticed that this metallic hardening was spreading from his nails to the joints and knuckles and that one finger after another was also becoming metal.

  Suddenly he shuddered and realized it was just a dream. He drew his fingers out from beneath the pillow and saw that the formerly metal places were dripping with blood. Was it his or someone else’s? He sprang to the porcelain basin and removed the lid. Quickly he rubbed his hands with the large cake of firm, lard soap. The lather was hard to make and now mingled with the claret of the blood, which entered the basin and snaked through the water like red lampreys. Then he shuddered again and realized he had been dreaming once more, and was actually at his headquarter
s in Tbilisi. He looked at his hands and saw no changes. Getting up, he removed the lid of the mottled basin and slowly soaped up his hands. He wasn’t worried about what he had dreamed, only the fact that he had fallen into two dreams now made him tense. Was he so tired or so dissatisfied that he had to drift off to sleep twice — and twice wake up with a shudder from a nightmare? He doubted it, but he was still worried. He called his orderly and summoned a meeting of the Eastern Army’s staff, with reports from the front for that day. He was far from the capital, he thought, too far from his wife Anastasia, and worlds away from any important task. He had been sidelined with a paper crown bearing the inscription ‘Viceroy of Russia’. That crown would never harden and turn golden. If he was in Petrograd or Mogilev everything would be different, he thought, but perhaps he was mistaken. In the Caucasus, the air was fresh but strangely dense, saturated with unparalleled crimes beneath the dignity of the imperial Russian army, while in the capital the air was close and heavy with insidious conspiracies and desperate decisions.

  The fetid air of disaster, fateful decisions, and the hope of salvation hung over the streets and canals of Moscow, Kronstadt, and Petrograd in those last days of 1916 like the smell of decay and the taste of transience. Apparitions flitted past beneath the streetlights: half human, half idea. The collapse of the system was accompanied by the downfall of its faithful, so responsible figures discharged their duties with furrowed brows and pursed lips, praying that their labours would make the difference between triumph and disaster. Everything hung by a thread from early morning till night. It was either victory or total defeat. The light of Christian Orthodoxy on the eastern marches of Europe or the darkness of Asia and Levantine degradation. Tomorrow was another day. Demons lurked behind every corner, and the obstacles on the path ahead were so numerous that not even the staunchest defenders of the Russian monarchy could foresee its future.

  The most persistent troublemaker, the most blatant menace and negator, was Rasputin, or ‘Our Friend’, as the tsaritsa called him. ‘Our Friend’, however, was only a friend of the German-born tsaritsa and perhaps the tsar. For all others he was a deathly threat and had to be eliminated. Orgies, immorality, the pretence of healing Tsarevich Alexei’s haemophilia, the disgracing of the royal court and poor counsel were pushing the Empire from the Kievan gate of Europe straight towards the postern of Asia. A handful of loyalists therefore decided to kill Rasputin. The decision was taken. Their brows were furrowed. Again, the outcome would determine the difference between triumph and disaster.

  The 16 December 1916, by the old calendar, was set as the decisive day. A lot of sixes in one date — three, even, if you consider the nine an upside-down six. But the job had to be done because, as with so many urgent matters, there was no one to accomplish it other than the brave conspirators. The group was headed by Prince Felix Yusupov, a strange man, who often went around his house wearing women’s clothes. Yusupov was the sole surviving son of Russia’s richest woman, Princess Zinaida, and he lacked for nothing. He had already tried to poison Rasputin once, but the cyanide did not affect him. It turned out that the ‘man of God’ had the habit of taking a little cyanide with his dinner every day. Starting in 1909, he took grain after grain of the poison and gradually became immune to the greatest murder weapon the nineteenth century had known.

  Therefore, in Yusupov’s second attempt, Rasputin would be killed four times over. All this was possible in Russia — and more: someone could be killed five or six times for symbolic or ritual reasons. But Yusupov received a visit from an old Oxford friend who explained that the British crown wished to participate in at least one of the four killings of Rasputin in order to strengthen the two countries’ alliance in the Great War. Yusupov agreed, and his ‘old Oxford friend’ sent the requisite instructions to London. He asked that an accomplished assassin be sent, and everything went according to plan.

  In history, this tale begins one cold night with heated carriages clattering out onto the snowy crystal of the Petrograd cobblestones to take Rasputin to Yusupov’s palace by the River Neva under the pretext that Yusupov’s wife Irina urgently needed the help of the seer’s ‘hot hands’.

  But at this point we must go back; the tale actually begins much earlier with the accomplished British agent Oswald Rayner setting off with a wicker suitcase on a journey from London to Russia — a long journey even in peacetime, and now even longer, given the need to detour the theatres of war. But Rayner was not to be discouraged. This was to be his longest journey with the least luggage. He took with him a change of winter and summer clothes, a tube of toothpaste, a bar of shaving cream and a brush, a photograph of a young woman in an oval medallion and an ‘envoy’ of the British crown: a Webley .455 revolver, which was to leave a souvenir from the Isles in Rasputin’s body.

  He departed on 7 December 1916 by the old calendar, or the day before Christmas by the new, without any Yule cheer or send-off, head­ing from London’s Victoria Station by rail to Dover. He stared through the window of the carriage at the relentless rain pouring down on the meagre British vegetation. No one was waiting for him in Dover. He changed from the train to a ship and started through the English Channel for the north of Spain by the same route which the Royal Navy under Nelson had taken on its way to defeat the Spanish fleet at Trafalgar. In Spain he spoke Spanish. He bought a ticket to Barcelona. Again he was on a train, which slowly made its way through orange-hued España. He saw trees laden with oranges and no one to pick them. In Barcelona he took another train, for the Côte d’Azur. He lied to an elderly lady and her granddaughter fluently in Spanish. In Nice he boarded a bus. He paid the driver in cash and thanked him in French, which he seemed not to speak nearly as well as Spanish. So he stayed silent in the bus. He stared into the mighty blue of the Mediterranean and felt nothing — neither satisfaction, nor sentimentality, nor sadness — when his gaze drowned in the expanses of the sea. He entered Italy at the little town of Ventimiglia. He boarded his third train on the Continent, which took him through pleasant, rust-red Tuscany and further into the gnarled south. In Brindisi he boarded another ship and travelled to Corfu, where he slept one night and didn’t talk with anyone, and then on to Salonika. There, Rayner finally heard English again from British diplomats. A car was waiting for him. This inconspicuous automobile with a high windscreen and folding roof had one important feature: it was equipped with two pairs of licence plates, Greek and Bulgarian. He immediately set off on this next, far from easy leg of the journey. Near the city of Kavala the driver removed the licence plates. While he was putting on the new ones, Rayner changed from summer into winter clothing. Neither of the men spoke a word in English or any other language. The car set off again and drove another seven hours through the night. It stopped at the coast of the Black Sea. Here at the town of Tsarevo, before dawn, Rayner boarded the Russian torpedo boat Alexander III, which took him to Odessa. Then, mingling with the ordinary Russian travellers, he went by bus to Kiev. He changed there and travelled on through the western Ukraine, and then caught a third bus destined for Petrograd.

  It was 16 December 1916 by the old calendar, shortly before midnight, when a heated carriage brought Rayner up to Yusupov’s festively illuminated palace. Rasputin was already there. The Englishman went down the wooden stairs into the cellar. The boards creaked beneath his hurrying feet. The ‘man of God’ had already been killed twice: he had been poisoned with cyanide again, this time with a far larger dose, and then stabbed with various sharp objects — knives, forks, and broken glass. Now it was time for the representative of the British crown to kill him a third time. Without speaking a word, Rayner took out the Webley .455 and fired one shot into Rasputin’s head. Then he returned the gun to the wicker suitcase and shook hands with the small conspiratorial committee, although he didn’t know anyone. In addition to the host, those present were Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich for the Romanov dynasty, Lieutenant Sergei Sukhotin for the Russian armed forces, the parliamentarian Vladimir Purishkevich for the State Duma,
and Dr Stanislav Lazovert, disguised as a valet, in the name of medicine.

  Dr Lazovert ascertained biological death, but Rasputin still had to be killed a fourth time. The conspirators dragged Rasputin’s body across the floor. His wild hair and beard snagged in the fringes of the heavy carpets. The killers tore out the snarls and continued to drag him along like a wild boar. They all left the building; the Russians made for Petrovsky Bridge to drown the ‘man of God’ and thus kill him a fourth time, while Rayner immediately started on his journey home.

  He left without any send-off, through the enamelled Russian night which seemed it would never see the day. Prince Yusupov’s heated carriage took him to the bus station. Mingling with the ordinary Russian travellers, Rayner caught the first bus to the Ukraine. He changed to a second, which made its way through sleepy Ukrainian towns, and there among the creased faces of the passengers he saw in the New Year by the Western calendar. A third bus then took him to Odessa, where he boarded the Russian torpedo boat Alexander III and was transferred over the Black Sea to Bulgaria. At the coastal town of Tsarevo he switched to a car. The inconspicuous automobile with a high windscreen and folding roof had one important feature: it was equipped with two pairs of licence plates, Bulgarian and Greek. The driver started the motor and they immediately set off on this far from easy journey. Near the city of Kavala the driver removed the licence plates. While he was putting on the new ones, Rayner changed from winter into summer clothing. Neither of the men spoke a word in English or any other language. The car set off again and drove another seven hours through the night to Salonika. There Rayner finally heard English again from British diplomats. He changed vehicles once more and was driven south to Vouliagmeni. From there he travelled on the second ship of his return journey, via Corfu where he slept one night and didn’t talk with anyone, to Brindisi, the ‘gate to the Adriatic’. Here, for the first time on the return journey, he boarded a train, which wound its way through the gnarled landscape of southern Italy towards pleasant, rust-red Tuscany and further north. He entered France at the little town of Ventimiglia and boarded the bus to Nice. He paid the driver in cash and thanked him in French, which he didn’t speak nearly as well as Spanish. Therefore he was silent in the bus. He stared into the mighty blue of the Mediterranean and felt nothing — neither satisfaction, nor sentimentality, nor sadness — when his gaze drowned in the expanses of the sea. In Nice he bought a ticket to Barcelona. Again he was on a train slowly making its way through orange-hued España. He saw trees laden with oranges and no one to pick them. In Spain he spoke Spanish. He lied fluently to a young lady and her niece. In Barcelona he took another train to the north of Spain. There he boarded the third ship of his return journey, plied the waters which the Royal Navy under Nelson had sailed on its way to defeat the Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, and entered the English Channel. No one was waiting for him in Dover. He travelled on to London by rail. He stared through the window of the carriage at the relentless rain pouring down on the meagre British vegetation. At the end of his journey he arrived at Victoria Station. There was no welcome home or anyone waiting for him on the platform.