The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  You want to go down for breakfast? No, that’s not possible because the banquet hall where breakfast used to be served is on the ground floor facing onto the street, and therefore it’s not safe. You have to order breakfast in your room, and that costs six roubles. It’s the same with the midday meal and supper. If you want to clean your shoes before going to bed, you can’t do it yourself because there are only three bellboys in the hotel who clean shoes — they alone have shoe brushes. Whether you like it or not, you have to call one of them up to your room to clean your footwear and pay three roubles per pair. Four people in the doctor’s room means twelve roubles. And if you don’t want to clean your shoes, a bellboy will still amiably ring at the door and shout: ‘Shoe-cleaning time, sir; open up, it’s time to have your shoes cleaned.’ And when you open the door they will ask you, of course, how many of you there are in the room. Everyone’s shoes have to be cleaned at the Astoria, even Marusya’s bootlets. That is the custom of the house, and its standards of hygiene are strictly observed.

  It was the same with all other things: the weak, red-hibiscus tea, which cost one rouble per person and had to be drunk at least once a day, as if it was medicine; new bedlinen, which had to be changed every day and cost two roubles; even every question asked of the receptionist cost twenty kopeks, whether he knew the answer or not. Whoever was able to stand it stayed on. Hotel bills were paid at noon and at eight in the evening. ‘There you are, sir. It was a pleasure, madam. Goodbye, and thank you for staying at the Astoria,’ was the last Dr Chestukhin heard when he had used up all his money after three days at that bloodsucking hotel and decided to return to his house on Runovsky Embankment.

  Three days had passed and the revolution had flared up like a fire with no one to fight it, so returning home turned into a whole day of stumbling about, running and ducking into side streets, which sometimes headed towards Runovsky Embankment but just as often led our fugitives away from it. Immediately after exiting the hotel, Dr Chestukhin, as a devout Christian, had wanted to go into St Isaac’s Cathedral for a moment with the others, but an old sexton at the entrance said: ‘You shouldn’t all go in — it’s not a sight for children’s eyes.’ Then the old man whispered to him, as if the doctor was his only friend, that Cossacks had come out of it with bloody hands and sabres not ten minutes earlier. They had caught twenty policemen loyal to the revolution and the Republic sleeping in the cathedral beneath the great dome, dead tired after three full days on patrol. The Cossacks crept in, and the policemen were so exhausted that they didn’t notice; so they went among them and twisted each one’s neck, or cut his throat with their sabres. Many of the policemen didn’t even realize they were killed. They breathed their last and just gave a little squeal like a pig slaughtered for Christmas. None of the sleeping men could get up and try to defend themselves.

  ‘You shouldn’t go in yourself, sir,’ the good man repeated, but Chestukhin replied: ‘I am a doctor. There may be survivors.’ He left Marusya with Margarita and entered St Isaac’s Cathedral. The sight he saw resembled an oil painting: waxen bodies and coagulated blood which looked like paint thickly applied to the corpses. At first he walked among the bodies, but then he ran and turned them over as if in a delirium. A bluish light made its way in through the cathedral’s high windows and mixed with the dark red of the blood and the white collars of the policemen. Their bodies lay there heavy and stiff, but still warm as if their life and dreams had not yet left them. He examined one of them — he was dead, and a second, and a third, and a tenth, and each and every one of them in turn. It was all like in a grisly painting: signet rings shone on stiff fingers, gold teeth gleamed in gaping mouths. The Cossacks had done their bloody work quickly and efficiently, making sure no one was alive when they left. The smell of coagulating blood rose to the dome of the cathedral and was so heavy that not even a surgeon could stand it. He ran, staggered, and came out onto St Isaac’s Square again. ‘There’s nothing I can do here. Let’s go,’ he said taciturnly. He left a few coins with the sexton while the smell of the dead was still fresh in his nose.

  But he knew he mustn’t give up and be weak. He grabbed Marusya and turned sharply from the square into Little Konyushennaya Street, where he saw a strange sight. A devoted officer was being buried in the small lawn by the entrance of a house. The mourners were few in number, but they blocked the street. ‘Just a minute please, just a minute,’ they repeated to Dr Chestukhin and his company, as if the funeral would only be holding up the traffic for a little while. Not just one, but two Orthodox priests were reading prayers for that two-day hero of the Petrograd streets. The doctor stopped and took off his hat. He listened to the priests, who seemed to box his ears with their ‘Glory to you, O Lord’, ‘Pure and immaculate’ and ‘Forgive him his transgressions’, and he felt like bursting into tears and laughing hysterically at the same time. But he didn’t dare to do one or the other, because the surviving comrades of the unknown hero now already considered him one of their own and even called out to him: ‘He was a great man and a brave soldier.’ ‘Yes, he was a soldier,’ the doctor replied. He and his company now managed to squeeze through the knot of people and hurry on. They spent the whole afternoon avoiding volleys of gunfire and individual bullets. He, aunt Margarita and the maid now no longer lugged the wicker suitcase; they had abandoned it when its handle broke in Liteyny Avenue.

  By early evening, all of them were so tired that they would have lain down in the street and surrendered to the tide of chaos, but they saw that just a little more exertion was needed to make it back to the house. After that long day of wandering, they finally reached Runovsky Embankment and home. The doors of the house were broken open, and the apartment was ransacked and everything turned upside down. They entered. They wanted to cry but didn’t have the strength. Inevitably, they regretted having gone off into the revolutionary city at all. Margarita and Nastia immediately began clearing away all that was broken, and the doctor embraced his child again and for the first time sank into a deep sleep. He was home again, and that was the most important thing.

  The grand duke now also had to finally head home. He had never felt comfortable as Russian viceroy in the Caucasus. In the first months of the New Year 1917, however, he was still a loyal soldier of the Empire. So it was that he was preparing an offensive in the Caucasus and dreaming of the construction of a railway line from Russia to Georgia when he received word of his brother’s abdication and his reappointment as commander-in-chief of the Russian forces in the Great War.

  Whether or not he made any comment was known only to his closest associates. Whether or not he felt sorry for his brother was known to him alone. His staff officers saw him preparing calmly and without a single twitch on his wrinkled, iron face. He was to leave for Mogilev and take command. It was a long journey even in peacetime — from Asia to Europe. He packed only a few essentials. He was a soldier, after all. He didn’t yet know that he would be commanding the ill-equipped Russian forces for less than ten days, so he wouldn’t need much gear on that trip anyway.

  THEIR TIME HAS PASSED

  ‘Father, my Father,’ the trader in oriental and European spices Mehmed Yıldız muttered to himself. ‘Father, my unjust Father, my prophetic Father, my lonely Father, my faithless Father, my Father who wrenched himself out of our culture — sixty years have passed since I too became a trader in Istanbul’s cobblestone streets. 1917 has come, and I must leave on a journey. Remember how the saying goes: a trader needs to spend six decades in Istanbul if he wants to stay and consolidate his business.’

  ‘Six centuries — why shouldn’t six centuries be the measure for us Yıldızes?’ Mehmed felt he heard his father Şefket say. ‘According to the old adage, a good, devout Turk and his descendants need to stay in Istanbul for six centuries if they want their generations to merge with the wood, waters and lifeblood of this city on the water.’

  ‘Father, my Father, you are to blame,’ the spice trader replied. ‘You broke the matrix that was meant for us.
Do you remember the fur? You offered your wares like a prophet, not like a trader; like an infidel, not like a Turk. You were more like the Syrians, the people from the stone; the Iraqis, the people from between the two rivers; the Jews, the people from the desert. And you were left all alone, belonging to no one. Alien. The Jews didn’t want you among them, the Syrians turned their heads away from you in the street, and the Mesopotamians pretended they didn’t know you. The Turks threw you out of their guild.’

  ‘But you have set everything right, my son,’ he felt he heard old Şefket Yıldız speak again. ‘You sold the fur business, left the Jewish quarter and descended the icy Camondo Stairs for the last time. Away from the infidels, you became a Turk down to the last grey hair on your head. You took on five apprentices like a proper Turk. And you loved them as your own sons like a proper Turk. You sent them to the Great War like every Turk should. And you prayed and cherished hope like a proper Turk. And you viewed every depth two-dimensionally like a proper Turk. And you read the untruthful Tanin every morning with your tea, like a good Turk. And you still think the righteous Padishah dwells by the Golden Horn and comes out every morning to pat his tame nightingales startled by the harsh, early snow! In all these years, have you not sold your six decades of trading ten times over and made them into six centuries? Was that not the sense of my end, when you left me to waste away and die like a sick dog?’

  ‘No, my Father,’ Yıldız the younger would reply, ‘your fate and your foreign, Western habits wormed their way under my skin, into my bloodstream and to my very grain. I have failed. I sold and vended, diddled and cheated at the scales — but it was no good. We Yıldızes will never make the mark of six centuries in Istanbul, only six decades. Yesterday I turned seventy-six and reached the tally of sixty years of trading. Now I am waiting, waiting for the final news, and I am ever more cheerful. That is a sure sign that the worst is to come.’

  Thus spoke the trader with words reminiscent of his father, and indeed, the worst now came to pass. Some people’s end, mainly that of infidels, comes with bad news; but for the righteous, who wager all they have, their time is up when the portents are good. The end of our trader in European and oriental spices came with favourable rumours from the battlefield. The Turkish fronts were advancing in the only two regions where the Great War still interested him. He was indifferent now to the Caucasian theatre of war where his first apprentice — his father’s namesake Şefket — had been cut down by Cossacks in the Battle of Ostip; he no longer wanted to know about the movements of the army at Gallipoli because his second apprentice, Şefket’s brother Orhan, had fallen there; and he had no more interest in Mesopotamia because there, at the walls of the red city of Kerbala, he had lost his third young apprentice, the bookkeeper who would never be.

  Reading his newspaper Tanin, he now skipped the news from these fronts and cared only about two particular lines of battle between the righteous and the infidels. In the first months of 1917 it was exclusively good news, that came from those far-flung lands! The German commander Count Kaunitz had killed himself in Persia at the end of 1916, and the Russians were melting away from Palestine after news of the unrest back home. Yıldız was glad when he read these reports, but the smile on his lips was little more than an outward grin, the polite patriotism desired by the Young Turk dictators whom Yıldız called righteous. That’s why he was of no interest to the spies who, like shadows, always drank one tea too many at the next table in the smoky tearoom. The old man from the Golden Horn fraternized with others like himself, but he only had a handful of friends, who mostly dozed as he told them edifying stories from the history of the great Padishah. Those were the ‘new friends’ he had enlisted at the end of 1916. And so 1917 arrived, and Yıldız was still wearing his put-on smile. He glanced to the side, looked emptily at his new acquaintances and grinned. He didn’t want to think of the end, he didn’t dare to, because the end would definitely be thinking of him.

  Thus it was. In the wake of the First Battle of Gaza on 26 March 1917, he heard rumour that his fourth apprentice had been killed. Was the old trader able to cry? Did he need to grieve? No, the smile did not leave his face because his apprentice Nagin, his dear beanpole with the infectious smile which dispersed all their worries, had died defending Jerusalem, the navel of the earth. Why should he not laugh? Why should the death his fourth apprentice not inspire him? After all, Nagin had died barring the approach to the city with its rich Christian, Jewish and Muslim fabric. He had refused to allow passage to the British infidels, and all the colours and smells of the city came to the defenders like oriental dancers. Only the defence of Istanbul could compare with the defence of Jerusalem, because only beneath a city like Istanbul did there flow such mighty, infidel nether rivers; only at that curve of the earth’s crust were they were so close to the surface that they could inundate the city with a different faith, a different colour and different smells at any moment. Was it not a beautiful thing to give one’s life so that the Turkish colour would prevail in Jerusalem? Perhaps only the manner of Nagin’s death embittered him: for he was crushed by a metal monster which the British infidels called a ‘tank’. It reduced him to a bloody pulp, and there was no telling which part was his head and which part were his white heels. No, no, Yıldız refused to believe it — he was simply killed, one way or another, at the walls of the city above the wild waters. Nagin fell at the approaches to the city, which thanks to his sacrifice would remain Turkish, if only for a little longer.

  Such were the thoughts of Mehmed Yıldız, who deceived himself that a smile and a game of dominoes with his sleepy new two-dimensional friends, or babbling with Hayyim the Merry, could delay the inevitable end. But 1917 exacted its merciless due. It was his sixtieth year of trading, as we recall, and it turned out very, very differently from how things had been in the first century, at the start of the Yıldızes’ time in Istanbul. Just one day later, they told Mehmed Yıldız that his fifth and last apprentice was dead. He had been killed by the last loyal Kuban Cossacks on the front where the Russians, paralysed by the revolution, were in full retreat and would soon exit the Great War for good. There fell his youngest apprentice, still a child, born in 1897. He was the last victim to be cut down by those same Russian Cossacks — grim, ferocious horsemen who went on killing for a day more because they had been sent to distant Arabia and could not bring their sabres to the aid of the tsar in the capital.

  That was the end. The smile vanished from the trader’s face. He repeated aloud the names of his apprentices: red-headed Şefket Fişkeçi was killed near Ostip in the Caucasus, cut in half by a Cossack’s sabre out in some God-forsaken steppe; Orhan Fişkeçi, his black-haired brother, died at Gallipoli, killed by an accurate shot from the Australian lines, just when he was dreaming the most beautiful of dreams; Omer Kutluer died of scurvy on the iron-red earth beneath the fortifications of Kerbala; Nagin Türkoğlu fell on the outskirts of Jerusalem; and his youngest assistant, the illiterate Omer Aktan, was cut down by the last loyal Kuban Cossacks.

  Rain began falling again in Istanbul; that intricate, embellished, forti­fied city of the righteous above the wild, infidel nether rivers — a city which only had to sleep too long and deep one night to wake up as Christian and Byzantine in the morning. Drop by drop, life by life . . . the rain seemed to be saying again that there was nothing more to be traded here. Should he give up? Should he sell off his shop and everything in it for a pittance? Was it worth haggling and short-weighting? Or should he try and run away?

  No, all the lights in his aged body had gone out. Now we see Mehmed Yıldız, the trader in oriental spices, preparing for a journey. In his thoughts, he wraps each of his apprentices in pale-green cloth and lowers him into the pit of his memory. He packs five suitcases. Soon he repacks the most essential things in three suitcases. He stops and thinks, and reduces his luggage to one suitcase. He throws it aside, too, and takes only one small, motley, camel-hide bag and puts almost nothing in it. He leaves the key in the lock, without tu
rning it: a small trove of spices for bums or burglars to find. He looks one last time at the bridge over the Bosporus and up to the Galata Tower. Somewhere there are the Camondo Stairs which he descended when he broke off all ties with the Jewish traders. Now he goes down along the Golden Horn. He departs into the unknown. His time is over. Six decades of trading will end in six deaths. Was there ever a trader less successful than him? He stops and looks back.

  The Great War ended for Mehmed Yıldız when he vanished from life and entered the realm of tales. Some say Yıldız Effendi’s heart broke at the coach station by the Bosporus: he collapsed like a sack, they say, like a sad body whose cheerful soul has finally flown. Others tell of him setting off into the unknown, far away, to live out his seventy-sixth year in that non-life, or afterlife, following sixty impressive years of trading in Istanbul. Others again claim he wandered as a carefree hermit far away from the Great War, happy among the infidels, and still clutching the camel-hide bag he had taken with him.

  But all of them agree on one thing: no one ever again heard of Mehmed Yıldız, the trader in oriental and European spices.

  The Great War thus ended for one successful Istanbul trader even before it was over; and even before it began, it was a more or less an ongoing affair in New York. The first morning ring of the reception bell at the Hotel Astor in New York marked the beginning of another great day for the many Germans gathered there. The Astor was the meeting place of many ‘little fish’ as well as big shots with German surnames, of all those who spared no effort to help the Vaterland and persuade America not to enter the Great War. It was 5 April 1917, and that morning, like every day, ten million German Americans asked what they could do for the Fatherland, not what the Fatherland could do for them. The cartographer Dr Willi Bertling arrived at the hotel in the early hours of the morning. He and Adolf Pavenstedt, the founder of the New York Staats-Zeitung newspaper, reviewed the maps of Belgium they intended to publish in the paper. According to those carefully falsified maps, Belgium had not been captured but ‘divided equitably’ between the great powers, making King Albert irrelevant. The two men glanced over the material again and agreed that it would dissuade America from entering the war.