The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  Just one and a quarter hours later, Dr Hugo Munsterberg entered the elegant smoker’s lounge of the Hotel Astor and took a seat beneath a large stuffed barracuda. He stroked his black-dyed moustache and looked around like a man satisfied with himself. Munsterberg was a lobotomist born in Massachusetts, a brilliant student of the University of California but also a person steeped in the chauvinism of the early twentieth century. His acquaintance with Dr Lombrozo’s theories that certain skull shapes made people criminals or revolutionaries changed Dr Munsterberg’s professional life. Beginning in 1907, he searched for ‘typical skull forms’ and put his knowledge at the service of Germany even before 1914. Now he had arrived at the ultimate discovery that the head shapes of ‘the typical American’ corresponded completely to the cranium parameters of ‘the typical German’ and wanted to share his findings with the German Ambassador in Washington, Count von Bernstorff. The two men met at around ten in the morning. They shook hands and then looked for a long time at drawings of dead men’s heads. Ultimately they agreed that it was a good thing and would convince the Americans not to enter the war.

  Around noon, the reception bell at the Hotel Astor rang once again. Walter Dresler arrived in New York. He was an American, head of a Berlin news agency, and travelled freely despite being under surveillance. He had graduated from the Juilliard School with flying colours, and before the Great War he had been headmaster of a selective school for German boys in Virginia. Now he felt his place was in Europe, at the side of the kaiser. His assignment at the Astor was to meet an unfortunate man, Robert Fay. This rebel was not German and did not have a German name, but his desire to destroy the British put him on a par with the most zealous of Teutonic chauvinists. Fay would show Dresler a blueprint of ‘the most destructive bomb the human mind has devized’. When Dresler rang the reception bell and asked in German for a single room for one night, Fay was already shifting from one leg to the other in the ballroom, where a small brass band was playing German wartime hits. Their meeting began as soon as the important visitor from Berlin had freshened up a little in his room.

  Dresler recognized Fay immediately from the photograph. A thin face with a toothbrush moustache, a pronounced nose shadowing half his jaw, and eyes which cast glances full of hate and envy at everything around him. Fay removed his grey gloves and imitating a gentleman, put aside his stick.. He said he had finished a sketch of the bomb at his hidden laboratory in the Bronx; it was to be smuggled on board a merchant ship and declared as something else. The composition of the bomb was: 25 pounds of TNT, 25 sticks of dynamite, 150 pounds of saltpetre, 200 bomb shells and 400 pieces of scrap metal. A certain Paul König was to help them put this sizeable charge on board one of the ships, and he too came to the hotel that day bearing some important information from the New York docks. The three men continued to talk and the band played the ‘Gott, Kaiser, Vaterland’ march ever louder. In the end, they agreed that the sinking of ships with Fay’s bombs would exasperate the Americans but wouldn’t make them decide to enter the war. ‘They didn’t go to war after the Lusitania, so why should they now?’ Dresler said and laughed like a jokester. The other two joined in the laughter and each of them ordered a cigar from the waiter. Then each of the men, satisfied with himself, smoked in silence.

  One o’clock in the afternoon was time for the Europeans’ midday meal. At the Astor, no one respected the American custom of having the main meal later in the day, so there was much clattering of cutlery on plates as the guests ate the Bavarian soup followed by stuffed Alpine-roast-hare washed down with Rhine Riesling. Shortly after the meal, at half past two, another unusual man arrived at the hotel: Richard Stegler, an expert on invisible ink. Having experimented with lemon juice and heard the rumour that the British wrote letters with semen, he combined all of this in a new formula using secret additives known to him alone. Now he wished to hand the formula to the first attaché of the German embassy, who arrived at the meeting with a staff member from the coding section. All three of them watched the demonstration of Stegler’s invisible ink and were satisfied with the results. Afterwards, as colleagues who had no secrets from each other, they spoke about the network of wireless telegraph stations on both American continents and also about the famous English-German dictionary (a rare edition from 1826) which served as the code book for the wireless telegraph messages. Although Stegler was an America born in Oregon, he and the two Germans laughed sweetly at American stupidity in being unable to break the codes. All three of them were convinced that the golden age of espionage would last until ultimate German victory, with America remaining neutral throughout the war.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time their meeting ended. At six o’clock, the translator Karl A. Führ had an assignment at the Hotel Astor. He didn’t meet anyone. He went to room 212, which was kept permanently for use by the German embassy, to do a translation. He finished the task at around seven and stayed on in the room a little longer. Afterwards he went downstairs, and in the foyer he passed Hans von Wedel and his wife going in the opposite direction. It was almost eight o’clock when these two counterfeiters met with a man whose name they didn’t know. The stranger spoke German with an American accent; they handed him twenty-two forged passports, and he immediately disappeared, taking the shortest route across the hotel foyer. The couple then ordered absinthe. For a little while longer they looked like ordinary Americans who had come to refresh themselves after a successful working day: he with a Borsalino hat, which he fanned himself with; she like a plump American lady in a floral dress emphasizing her hips. After nine in the evening, the woman asked her husband: ‘Hansi, do you think there’ll be war?’ ‘No,’ her husband replied without hesitation and continued to sip his absinthe like a man whose conscience was completely clear.

  The last business meeting of that day took place shortly before midnight. Representatives of the American Correspondent Film Company, an American-German production firm, reported on the numerous newsreel propaganda films from the Vaterland which they screened in their cinemas in Massachusetts. The sizeable audience filled them with pride, and everyone in that cheerful midnight crowd was confident that America would never go to war. The reception bell at the Hotel Astor rang for the last time at one o’clock in the morning, ending another successful day for the Germans in America. The bell would sound again in the morning and a colourful collection of people with a restless past and a clear conscience would begin to stroll the halls of the hotel again, or they wouldn’t. At dawn on 6 April 1917, the President of the United States of America announced that the country had declared war on Germany. That was the end.

  All the Germans in America knew in their hearts that the Vaterland would be unable to withstand a war against America. The age of German espionage and propaganda came to an abrupt end. Up until that fateful date, all the Germans had made a great effort to prevent that from happening, and no one felt it was their fault that America had entered the Great War; therefore, on 6 April 1917, the film-makers, counterfeiters, bombers, coders, cartographers, lobotomists, translators, newspaper editors and saboteurs from the New York docks still had a clear conscience.

  ‘I have a clear conscience preparing this play at old Birot’s expense,’ Guillaume Apollinaire said and added: ‘Birot is an absolute fool. He made a packet selling his wartime postcards, so why shouldn’t I accept his money?’

  This was a wonderful period for Apollinaire again. And a terrible one at the same time. His latest girlfriend, Ruby, told him she was pregnant. But the child would not be born, Ruby was adamant. The unhappy father therefore turned to theatre. He wanted to put on his Breasts of Tiresias at the René Mobel Theatre in Montmartre. The idea of staging a play came from Pierre Albert-Birot, the small manufacturer of the wondrous wartime postcards which wrote themselves even after the death of the soldier. The two men had sat together at the end of 1916. The poet and lover had recommended Birot his play about Thérèse, who changes her sex and becomes Tiresias, and then obtains power over men like
the Theban soothsayer Teiresias. A stupid plot — Apollinaire even thought so himself — but old Birot was enthusiastic. The stupider the better, Apollinaire mused, and rolled up his sleeves.

  The theatre was leased and the actors paid in advance. The writer adapted the play. Old Birot was still enthusiastic. The women on stage had to be naked: Birot applauded. A sex scene at the end would attract a young audience: Birot lewdly approved. All the affectation and playing around with music and shooting would attract Paris’s artistic rabble and extract the last centime from their pockets to pay for a ticket: the manufacturer in the role of producer gave a knowing nod. The worse the better. Avant-garde. Rehearsals began.

  The director and writer invariably spoke about pacifism at the rehearsals, but inside he was thinking of defeatism. He knew it — he knew his time had passed. He no longer believed in war. Where were the times when the urge had taken him down to the recruitment office twice? Now his head hurt terribly and he was living his last year. The worse the better. His rehearsals boiled down to tirades of swearing. Whoever didn’t want to undress was literally chucked out. Whoever agreed to undress had to sing from the proscenium immediately so that the pretty pianist, who Apollinaire had his eye on and imagined as his next sweetheart, had something to do.

  When the play was finally being rehearsed, old Birot came onto the stage.

  ‘What should I put on the poster?’

  ’Just the title: the Breasts of Tiresias,’ replied the poet and aspiring director.

  ‘That’s too short. People will think it’s some kind of cubist drama, and that’s not patriotic.’

  ‘Piss off!’

  ‘Guillaume, Guillaume, you’re as a son to me. Don’t talk like that with your foster father. Come on, what should we write?’

  ‘Let’s write: a crude play . . . No, wait: a supernaturalist drama, or a surrealist drama.’

  And so a movement was born. A drama with nudity, shooting, singing and a sex scene at the end turned out to be a flop in 1917. But the play caused quite an outcry. All the surviving artists were at the première. André Breton came together with the returnee Cocteau. Breton was dissatisfied with the play’s lyricism, or paucity thereof, but how irritated Jean Cocteau was! At the end of the second act, he got up with his revolver in hand and headed towards the conductor. He cocked the gun and demanded that the he stop the performance. The music paused for a moment, but then the audience thought the Breasts of Tiresias must really have something going for it if a little guy in an ironed French army uniform with a gun in hand wanted to stop it, so they managed to push Cocteau aside and told the deathly-pale conductor to continue the performance. Breton took the tidy soldier outside, and Cocteau grinned.

  ‘Why didn’t you fire, you idiot?’ Breton yelled at him.

  ‘What, kill that weakling with the white baton? Never! The gun isn’t loaded, see?’

  ‘But killing him would have got the best reviews and everyone would have taken notice of you.’

  ‘In jail perhaps. This way, I’ll become more famous than the Breasts of Tiresias.’

  ‘Jean, you’re a fool,’ Breton shouted.

  ‘No, I’m a lie that speaks the truth!’ Cocteau replied and set off by the shortest route to the Seine.

  The others, of course, rushed to Old Combes’s Closerie des Lilas and Old Libion’s Rotonde after this successfully unsuccessful play. That was one of the few evenings which resembled the way things used to be. Most others were quite unlike those of the golden days of 1914 and 1915. In the idle nights when there were no smutty premières, the two old publicans sat at their respective bars feeling bored. Just the day before, Old Libion had stroked his thick grey moustache and pondered how long it had been since someone last got up on a table and made a speech; how long it had been since someone had pissed down their leg (oh, those were the days!) or taken out a revolver and shouted, ‘I’ll kill you all!’, and everyone in the café had ducked under the tables; how many years had it been since he heard the hate-filled cry, ‘Damn Boches!’? No, he thought, his time had passed. Old Combes reflected on things similarly. Just the other day he had watched a sticky fly, from the toilet, with little legs bound not to be particularly clean. It slowly climbed up the clean champagne glasses in the bar, but Old Combes didn’t think of swatting it. So what if it soiled the glasses? Who was going to order any 1909 Dom Pérignon now, thinking it a good vintage? No, Old Combes thought too that his time had passed.

  But that is not what that girl of a woman, Kiki de Montparnasse thought. She quit her job at the canning factory and would not go to the boot workshop any more because all the dead who had loved her in their cobwebby arms became a weight on her mind. She heard that America had entered the war, and she saw the whole of Paris celebrating and waving little French and American flags. The war was as good as over, she thought. But she didn’t think her time had passed; on the contrary, it seemed just about to come. As if she was acting out the Breasts of Tiresias in real life, she realized she had gone around for long enough in a man’s hat and overcoat. She had to bare herself, take off her clothes and set off through life naked. She wanted to earn her living with her body, but not in a million years would she prostitute herself. Yes, she may have been an illegitimate child, but she had a mother who taught her morals! She would go naked and be a model, but she would always remain true to herself: she would work in one place and take her money in another. That would stop her from resembling a courtesan, to herself or others.

  This new flirt entered the Rotonde. She looked gorgeous: a mixture of a Greek caryatid and a child’s toy. She sat down at a table by herself (how ribald!), lit up a cigarette (unheard-of for a lady!), crossed her legs, raised her pert dress so everyone could see her thighs going up to her bottom and, to jeers from café visitors, ordered an absinthe (a German drink!). ‘There is no absinthe, we only serve French drinks,’ Old Libion said, and behind the bar he asked the painter Kisling who the new floozie was. Kisling replied in mock confidence. He cupped his hand over his mouth and turned towards the proprietor, but he spoke so loudly that even passers-by on street could hear: ‘Oh, that’s just a little slut, an easy lay.’ Everyone laughed, but Kiki knew she had bagged her first painter. She stayed till late in the evening, and Kisling came ever closer to her. First he had been sitting at the bar. Later he was at the neighbouring table. And finally he asked Kiki the smoker for a light and joined her at her table. They left for his house. The painter sang in the street, and people pelted him with empty tins from their windows. He groaned above Kiki all that night, but for her it was something new. She hadn’t made love with a man of flesh and blood in two years. She no longer had Jean, Jacques and Jules, the spirits from the boots — now she had a real painter instead. He wasn’t exactly a great lover, but she climaxed all the same. Or simulated it.

  From the next day on, the two of them were inseparable. Kiki became Kisling’s model, but she wouldn’t accept any remuneration for posing. She made love but didn’t charge for it either. She was managing to nicely implement her plan, when she met her next protector. He was the most famous Japanese man in Paris, the painter Tsuguharu Foujita. Fate brought them together via a raid at Old Libion’s. Gendarmes on bicycles made a swoop on the café searching for Bolsheviks who drank there. Libion crossed himself. He knew nothing about Bolsheviks or Mensheviks; they were all good-for-nothings to him. Kiki and Foujita were the last to leave. He was wearing a white silk kimono, which disconcerted the police so much that they didn’t put him in the Black Maria. And when he, in his strange ‘dress’, claimed Kiki was his companion, they didn’t arrest her either. She stood there on the Paris sidewalk: the rain had rather soaked her hair and thighs. Her dress clung to her chest. She looked passionate. Foujita couldn’t take his eyes off her. Kisling wailed in vain from the Black Maria, as desperate as a dog being dragged off to the pound: ‘Kiki, you’re mine! Kikiii!’ But she became Foujita’s.

  Two days later, Kisling was released from custody and Kiki met up with him. She d
idn’t tell him straight away that they were no longer a couple. She could pretend to be a model for two painters at the same time. But now she needed money, she said in a pleading sort of tone, times were hard. And so Kisling offered her money. Day after day she made him pay for everything they did together, but she didn’t go back to him. Kisling’s time was up. Now she was with Foujita, and she didn’t demand anything from him. She posed for him naked. The Japanese explained poses 26 and 37 of traditional Japanese lovemaking to her. He showed her a book with lascivious Japanese watercolours, in which the men had enormous members and the women incredibly shaggy crotches. Without taking their eyes off the book, the two of them made love, sometimes several times a day. Kiki no longer knew where her legs were: she spread them upwards, stretched them to the side, and did the splits. The Japanese was a great lover in a small body, but he would still have to pay one day when she decided to leave him. But for now everything was alright. They made love in the morning, at noon, in the afternoon, and also late in the evening when nothing else was happening. When the setting sun shone low into the painter’s atelier, it seemed to Kiki that their long shadows on the wall were frantically making love in time with their frenzied bodies. She wasn’t afraid of the shadows or the passing thought that she could get syphilis, that tragic seal of all libertines.