But another footloose figure — a real refugee, in fact — was afraid even of his own shadow. He wasn’t a rake and didn’t have a lover. He was quiet. His wife, son and daughter had remained behind in Serbia. In Paris in 1917, Vladislav Petkovich Dis was only a shadow of his former self. He walked along Rue Monge, where he had a cramped little flat, and his shadow, which reached all the way up to the first-storey balconies, was significantly longer than those of other passers-by. Why didn’t anyone notice? He himself watched the dark, freakish shape plodding along with him like some giant, articulated insect and rushed from narrow Rue Monge to Boulevard du Montparnasse, where there was more light and the sidewalk was wider. That made him feel a little more at peace, but he didn’t stay there among the nervous cars which seemed to be blowing their horns just at him. Instead, he hurried to the Luxembourg Gardens and a metal sculpture of a mother clasping her two children in her arms; to him, they looked like his own Mutimir and Gordana.
This poet with the tousled, curly hair hurried to see the metal mother and her children that day, too, because a stranger — he couldn’t remember who — had told him that the metal family would soon be melted down. The French Republic needed as much metal as it could get for the production of munitions. ‘Hard times have come, my good sir, and I too am sad about this mother and her children,’ the stranger said. ‘You mean you have a son and daughter back in Serbia? Sorry to hear it.’ the poet didn’t reply and didn’t think of saving this copper family if he couldn’t save his own. Every day he hurried to the gardens and was glad to see the family still together. ‘Just this one day more,’ he repeated inside, ‘and when they remove you I’m going home to my own family.’
All through the spring, the family in the Luxembourg Gardens remained together, and then they vanished overnight, just as the warden of the gardens had predicted. Only a mark remained in the grass where they had stood. Nothing was left behind: not even the pedestal the mother and her children had stood on. Everything was taken to be melted down in the foundries of war, and that was the sign for Vladislav Petkovich Dis to head home. He returned to the flat in Rue Monge and started putting his things in a small wicker suitcase. As a refugee he didn’t have much to take with him. He decided to pack everything which was still in good nick — several shirts, long underwear, a few pairs of socks and a straw hat — and then something happened which he didn’t find unusual at first. He packed the things in the evening, paid the landlady for the flat with the last of his money and was even a few sous short, and then went to bed, ready to leave Rue Monge the next day. When he looked at his suitcase in the morning, he saw that all his things were wet, as if a washbasin of water had been spilt over them during the night. That was not such a surprise in itself, as his small room contained a bath and, with plenty of leaks, it seemed possible that water had come in from somewhere. He leaned outside, held out the palms of his hands and looked into the low, grey Paris sky. There was no sun, but no rain either. The landlady had no explanation; she told him she had slept soundly all night and hadn’t heard a thing. So he asked if he could stay a day or two longer so as to dry his things, and she kindly obliged although he had been several coins short with the rent.
After craning his neck and looking up to find the faithless sun, the poet decided to hang up his shirts, trousers and long underwear with pegs on the small French balcony and leave them there. He spent the day at the editorial office of La patrie Serbe and took part in erudite discussions. A certain Dr Alexander Purkovich was visiting and defended his opinions in a thunderous voice. ‘They’re all crooks, my dear Dragomir,’ the moustachioed stranger emphasized, ‘victims of their own ambitions and inner urges they’re unable to curb. They strive for power and care little for the misfortunes of the people.’ And Dragomir Ikonich, the editor of the magazine, replied in much the same vein. Dis added a word or two, but all his thoughts were with his coarse linen shirts and long winter-underwear which he hoped had dried.
In the late afternoon, he went back to Rue Monge and was satisfied that his clothes were now dry. He folded them once again, put them in the suitcase . . . and then slapped himself on the forehead. How could he decide to return home to Serbia without having told anyone in France? He couldn’t steal away and leave just like that, even if he was a refugee. Was that why his clothes had got wet? He had to get over being such a loner, he resolved, so he wrote two farewell letters to his fellow refugees in Les Petites Dalles. He would tell his Paris friends about his decision the next day. And so he went to bed, but in the morning another unpleasant surprise was in store for him: his clothes were wet yet again. Once more, he hung them up on the little terrace and thought he could write a poem about the strange occurrence; it had to be connected to his plans to journey home to his family. He sent the two letters to Les Petites Dalles, and later he told the editor of La patrie Serbe that he wanted to go back. Ikonich replied laconically and was then surprised when the poet requested if he could come to sleep a few nights at the editorial office; Dis confided in him that his clothes were wet every morning although they had been dry when he put them in the suitcase the previous evening. ‘That must be the damp, my dear Dis. All the little Parisian flats are damp these days. We’ve just got used to it and don’t notice it any more. If your lease has expired and you haven’t renewed it, of course you can move here and dry your pants.’
And that is what Dis did, except that his clothes were wet again in the morning even after having dried in the editorial office. Now Ikonich, too, called it a ‘mystery’, but the poet would wait no longer. ‘I’m leaving now, dear fellow. The money I send isn’t reaching my family, and I can’t bear being out of the country any more.’ And he left. Via Marseilles, Rome and Naples, straight to his death. He embarked on the ship Italy, which sailed for Corfu at nine in the evening on 15 May 1917 by the Julian calendar. On board the ship, he no longer took his things out of the suitcase. Nor did he even try to hang them up on the lower, third-class deck. He hoped that the kind sun of the south on Corfu would dry him, as well as his shirts and long underpants, but he was mistaken. On the morning of 17 May by the old calendar, the Italy was torpedoed out at sea. The passengers screamed, and shortly before the ship went under the priests prayed with their small flock. The ship’s bell tolled, and the passengers who could swim were the first to rush and grab the safety rings. Our poet fell into the cold water and didn’t even try to swim because he had never learnt. His suitcase was with him and now finally revealed to him why the clothes inside it were always wet. He thrashed about like a hooked fish for a little longer and then went under. He sank slowly, like a sack of salt, and circled with his right arm as if writing fluid blank verse on invisible paper. The poet’s last thought was that nothing could compare with the silence of the sea.
The next day, his body was washed ashore close to Corfu city. For Vladislav Petkovich Dis, the Great War ended when his body was found by a group of local boys. He had one and a half drachmas and a broken pair of spare glasses in his pocket. No one found the suitcase with the wet clothes, because war devours people and everything human, along with all that is inanimate and inhuman. No one knows or can keep track of all that is discarded and expended, to be lost to memory.
In Russia there was a great attrition of good and bad alike, of the human and the brutish. The Republic was foundering in a ferment of blood, sweat, hopes, words and disappointments. The government and its ministries issued ukases, one more ridiculous and monstrous than the other. The country was grumpy, bumpy and disorganized, with the government’s authority scarcely felt more than ten kilometres beyond the capital. Wild Cossacks, angry at having been unable to preserve tsarism, now brandished their sabres at the talkative and the taciturn alike. A Cossack Republic was founded on the River Don with its own laws, different to those of Petrograd: laws written in blood. The Cossacks broke up the soviets in Rostov-on-Don, and in Kharkiv they attacked and killed the striking coal miners as if they were Turks, cleaving many of the fleeing men from shoulder
to groin with their sabres. Terror reigned on the roads, robbery in the side streets, and rhetoric in the squares. Soldiers’ delegates came from the front, desperate to get their arguments across. Tauride Palace, the seat of the new government, was full to bursting with words: some tender, others harsh. Words marched in columns down Nevsky Prospekt, along the promenades by the Church of the Saviour and down the promenade by the Malaya Nevka; despite their utter devaluation, everyone thought that one single word — just the right one — would be able to save the whole situation.
The prisoner Nicholas Romanov knew virtually nothing about what was going on. Occasionally one of the guards would say a thing or two, and sometimes his infrequent visitors would bring news, but Nicholas felt like a ship which had sailed out to sea and ever more rarely received word from land. So he worked more and more in the garden, spoke little and tried to get as much sleep as possible. Something strange started happening in his dreams: he dreamed of himself, but not as if he was alive, but rather as if he was in the dreams of others. He couldn’t say how it happened, but clearly they were people in the future who were dreaming of him. To begin with, one night he dreamed he was being dreamed of by a nun, Maria Ivanovna. In his dream, that is in Maria Ivanovna’s, he saw a house in the provinces and brutish guards like wild animals who drank vodka by the tumblerful all night. He heard that they were preparing to kill the imprisoned tsar and his family, and he saw himself in Maria’s dream silently eating fish at the dinner table and hoping he would choke on a bone and die like an ordinary coward. Then one night in Maria’s dream they were abruptly fetched and taken down to the cellar. It was for safety reasons, they were told. The tsar saw himself going down and carrying Tsarevich Alexei, who was too weak to walk. Later in that dream, which was not his own, he saw those savage men from the ground floor, their faces red from vodka, coming in and pointing their rifles and pistols at them. He couldn’t believe it: Maria seemed unable to accept the death of the tsar’s family in her dream. The pistols just clicked as if they were empty, the rifles jammed, and, as things go in dreams, they were saved at the last minute by Polish forces loyal to General Denikin. Where was that place? What was that house? He couldn’t find that out from Maria Ivanovna’s dream because she always woke up at the same time. But the dream also revealed a little from Maria’s real life: it seemed she lived in the future, perhaps in the year 1928 or 1933, and she was a nun at the Russian monastery in Belgrade, who every night persistently dreamed of the tsar.
Nikolai Romanov did not just seize on her dream as a way of interpreting his own. He was also dreamed of by a Russian porter at the railway station in Vienna. Then there was a former Russian soldier from the Eastern Front, as well as a rakish Russian son who never ceased to pine for his parents’ endless fields in his dear old motherland and spent his time in Venice with a terminally ill Italian woman. There was also a former landowner who danced the kazachok between the tables of smoky Parisian cafés as a refugee in the distant future, and there were various cripples and otherwise impaired men who published émigré newspapers, moved in dubious circles and loved dangerous women. And all of them lived in the future and dreamed of the tsar. There was another strange thing too: all of them seemed to dream one and the same dream with only slight variations. It was one and the same house. He soon became familiar with its appearance and the layout of the rooms, and with his family in it. Withdrawn into himself, the tsar worked the small estate. He ate in silence, and his fork clanked against the mismatched plates. The fish tasted mouldy. The bunch of barbaric men guarding them got ferociously drunk and said through the dreams of those visionaries in the future that they were going to kill the tsar, but that they wouldn’t harm the grand duchesses. Then there was a moonless night. Animals howled in the wolfish forests above the house. Soldiers took the tsar’s family away in silence, or they burst into their rooms, stabbed the eiderdown quilts (feathers flew everywhere like fine snow), smashed the wooden icons and read Nilov’s Antichrist — the tsaritsa’s favourite book — and grinned like hyenas. Then the cellar. Always that cellar! They were taken there under the pretext that it was safer. A moment later, in the dreams of the editors, rakes, kazachok dancers and nuns, the pistols and rifles were unable to fire. They broke, seized up or clicked empty. The officers yelled at the executors. The killers cried. Or they didn’t. He and his family were saved by loyal White Guard forces. The dreamers in the future awoke with a scream. The imprisoned tsar deceived himself and thought: if these people, like holy fools, are really dreaming of us in the future, that means we won’t be killed and our time won’t be over. That encouraged him a little in his confinement; but how wrong the last Russian monarch was.
His killers set off from Zürich in a sealed wagon of the German railways. Over a decade had passed since these diurnally sombre but nocturnally ebullient Bolsheviks had fled from Russia. Now, in March 1917, they felt the time had come to return to their frayed and troubled country. But how were they to get to Russia? The whole of warring Germany lay in their path. England and France were of no mind to help the deserters and send them back to Russia via orange-hued España, the route by which, in 1916, they had sent the assassin Oswald Rayner, who had killed in the name of the British crown,. The small Bolshevik committee from Lake Geneva and Zürich therefore asked Germany for assistance. Seeking passage from Russia’s enemy did not disturb those cheerful revolutionaries who dreamed of change and a new pair of shoes each day. Besides, they were against the war and, at the same time, above it. They wanted to halt the war, so they were good human cargo on the German railways. Their request, lodged by the Swiss socialist Fritz Platten, was duly approved. Forty comrades with families and luggage would set off in two sealed wagons which would be joined to the trains of the state railways of Baden, Württemberg and Hessen following exact German timetables. The passengers travelled incognito. They weren’t allowed to leave the wagons or receive any visitors during the journey. The Bolsheviks accepted these conditions and began packing their suitcases. None of them found damp clothes in their suitcases in the morning and only one of the travellers would have any doubts as to whether returning to Russia was a good idea.
This momentous journey by train began at ten past five on the morning of 24 March 1917. All of Lenin’s companions, like Ulysses’s sailors, turned up to their appointment with destiny. Russian, Swiss and Austrian Bolsheviks started out on the journey from Zürich that day; among them was the Austrian Karl Radek, the only one who would not be the same after the ten-day journey. It was all because of a boy — one such as Radek would have liked to have as a son. As soon as the train with its happily singing passengers in twenty compartments (first-, second- and third-class) crossed the Swiss-German border, these personae non grata realized for themselves what war meant. They had spent five years as cultured refugees, poor but with neatly-mended clothes, drinking coffee with whipped cream in cheap, dusty Swiss cafés. Now the time had come to see the face of the Great War through the windows of their compartments. Dead horses and donkeys with wide-open, foaming mouths lay on both sides of the railway line, and they didn’t see a single man on the platforms of the small stations where they stopped. At one station, a crowd pushed up to the window of the compartment where comrades Zina Zinovieva and Nadya Krupskaya were sitting because they had spotted half a loaf of crumbling white bread behind the glass of the window. The German nights they made their way through shone with thousands of stars, but there was ever a dull flickering and a hint of thunder in the distance.
No one seemed to want to attach any importance to that, however. A tense vivacity prevailed in the sealed wagons. Nadya made tea on an old Swedish alcohol stove, while Lenin read, or briskly debated with comrades in German, Russian and French. The travellers admired the beauty and majesty of the black German forests and the crystal green of the winding River Neckar as if they were a group biologists or art historians on an excursion. They were inspired when they passed through medieval German cities, dark and seared, which bowed their reactio
nary facades to greet the travellers.
All of them were in high spirits; all of them, like the mariners of Antiquity, were sure of the journey, although no one knew how the opposite shore would look. Only Comrade Radek was despondent. He tried to relax with the others at first, and joined in when they played the guitar and sang, but he was forever peering through the window. And all because of a boy. He first noticed him at the station in Rottweil pushing a large luggage cart overloaded with the bags of late travellers, as an adult porter might. You might ask what was so special about that boy, whom the Austrian Bolshevik watched through the bluish window pane of the sealed wagon that night, far after midnight. He was delicate, skinny to the extreme, with a freckled nose and a look both sad and ruffianly, as of a child grown up prematurely. Did he feel he’d like his son to look like that, if he had one, or was he touched by the sight of the boy pulling a load which dwarfed his tiny figure? He couldn’t say.
The train stood at the station for a whole half hour, and he watched the boy pushing the luggage cart up and down the platform, hardly getting it to move, and throwing on suitcases which fell off along the way. Who was that boy, and what was it that moved him that night? He didn’t know; the train moved off again and he was sure that this sight would mingle with the mosaic of other unpleasantries in warring Germany. But already at the following station, in Oberndorf, he could have sworn that he saw the same boy again. Now he was standing on the platform all alone, as if he was waiting for someone. How had he managed to get there at the same speed at which the State Railways of Baden travelled? Or perhaps he had a twin brother. Radek wanted to open the window and call out to him, but the train started off again, and he waited for the next stop in the old town of Stuttgart, where he saw the same boy again. He wailed and covered his mouth with his hand so the others wouldn’t hear. The boy was wounded and leaning on a crutch. It was the same face and the same freckled nose, but his face had the look of an abandoned puppy. The boy was standing alone, about to renounce his hastily acquired earnestness and flee beneath his mother’s skirts, but there was no one who would come to his aid from the group of Bolsheviks or the nearby carriages of the German and Swiss railways. Were there no other travellers? And where was the boy’s mother, Comrade Radek asked himself when the train with the two sealed wagons continued its journey.
The Great War Page 39
