‘Beware of loose threads,’ Guillaume Apollinaire often spoke in those days, acting the sage, while Paris was mourning for Mata Hari and every man felt at least a little guilty for not having tried to save her. However, a city like Paris could not have heroes for long or mourn for fallen souls for more than a month. That perfumed cloaca simply had to amuse itself, just as a clown has to perform and paint a smile on his face before the show, even if it be swollen from crying. Within a week, the sun shone and every arrondissement of the city threw off the mask of guilt and began to enjoy the last of the sun in the dying autumn, which covered the Avenue de la Republique with red leaves, sent strange rays into the Tuileries Gardens, saw unusual folk out strolling by the Grand Palais, and witnessed a strange wedding in the world of licentious artists.
The protagonists of that wedding were a painter and a married woman. How could a married woman remarry? It was 1917 and young women became free-minded. Morning affairs alternated with evening flings. The men were away on the battlefield, and every summer beneath the hot, bright star of Sirius the starved women sought someone to substitute their husbands in bed. The most ragged-skirted wenches claimed they hadn’t heard from their husbands for weeks, or even months. It was easy enough to establish if they were dead, at least, but who was going to look into their whereabouts if even their wives had forgotten them? a few francs at the city mortuary and a few more at the army administration office sufficed for the issuing of a certificate confirming the ‘temporary disappearance’ of a husband, and in Paris this was sufficient for a married woman to remarry.
The painter Kisling fell in love with Renée Jeannou, a twenty-year-old blonde with a bob fringe down to her eyebrows, who wore shorts and mismatched socks. She looked a bit like Kiki but was far more classy and, as the painter said, ‘never farted outside the toilet’. Kisling needed Renée Jeannou to heal his wounds from Kiki (the source of her income dried up overnight), and Jeannou needed Kisling so she could remarry. She didn’t think Kisling was a paragon of virtue. She knew he was a rake and that his manners were no better than a bandit‘s, but she reasoned that if only she could remarry and cast off her ‘temporarily disappeared’ Breton sculptor, everything else would be a piece of cake. Her second husband would be replaced by a third, and where there was a third he could easily be replaced in bed by a fourth.
Fiancé Kisling knew Renée Jeannou’s first husband. He had even gone out boozing and philandering with him in 1914, and now he turned up to console his ‘widow’ and ‘cherish the memory of the great artist’. He arranged a grandiose wedding, where the wedding guests would parade through the streets like a religious procession. The day came round and all of Paris gathered for that dubious celebration with wedding rings and vows. The procession left from Kisling’s flat in Rue Joseph Bara. Everyone was in that crowd: Kiki and Foujita, Old Combes and Old Libion, André Breton, Jean Cocteau (without the pistol at his belt), Apollinaire and the flirt who played the piano at his première of the Breasts of Tiresias. The merry company rolled along the street. Some played the mouth organ, others beat drums without any rhythm, while others blew whistles. When the procession was passing the Rotonde, Old Libion stepped aside for a minute and came back to salute all the wedding guests with his sourest wine, which he claimed had been maturing in the cellar for ten years. (Ten years? Tell us another one!)
Once the mob had inundated the Hotel Villa, the bride and groom were determined to say their fateful-fickle ‘yes’ at the district office. The mayor’s assistant was in attendance. All at once, the bride uttered a scream: she was looking at Kisling, but in his face she had suddenly seen her former husband, who undoubtedly was still alive. Had there been a mix-up? Had the Breton sculptor managed to ensconce himself in the building and surprise his faithless wife? Nothing of the sort. The bride had just temporarily lost her wits. Kisling, disconcerted, felt he had lost his respectable fiancée there in front of the altar. But then the best man and the witnesses dashed out of the crowd. They tried to reassure Jeannou that her former husband was ‘temporarily disappeared’, but she wouldn’t listen to them. She yelled and screamed, pounding her fists on Kisling’s shoulders: ‘Get out of my sight, you Breton shit, and let me live!’
Of course she should have a life, but why did Kisling have to have bruises? Now Cocteau stepped forth from the crowd. Calmly, he took out his razor (he always carried one with him) and said: ‘Dear Renée, look, this is not your husband. This is the failed painter Kisling,’ and as he spoke he started to dry-shave the painter’s moustache, then his sideburns and finally Kisling’s eyebrows. Before Renée Jeannou there now stood a freak with a face like a doll from a Boulevard Haussmann toyshop; but the bride was cured. A normal look returned to her eyes, and a smile to her lips. The district mayor’s assistant was finally able to read out the wedding vows, and he proceeded as fast as possible because he wanted to get this gaggle of tipplers and ex-soldiers out of his building.
The marriage ceremony was carried out in complete silence. Finally it was done. The bridegroom looked as if he had just survived a fire, and the bride as if she had just finished a good round of vomiting after a night out drinking. Both of them were pale, but the procession went on. The music was becoming ever more distant and the merrymaking moved to other streets and squares.
Songs of travelling musicians were still heard towards the end of October in Venice, too, although no one was in the mood for music in those days. The Austro-Hungarian 5th Army, under the command of Svetozar Boroevich von Boina, was joined by nine Austrian and six German divisions under Otto von Below, which had been withdrawn from the Eastern Front. The offensive southwards into Italy, towards the River Tagliamento and the town of Caporetto, began two hours after midnight on 24 October and completely surprised the Italians. Soon Venice was under siege. The front line was just ten kilometres from Mestre and the isthmus leading to the city on the water. Thick fog flourished, descending on the canals, alleyways and streets like a nocturnal decoration.
Many musicians were trapped in the fog, but still they played their slightly lascivious southern melodies, even if no one put a lousy lira their way. Their desire was to entertain people, not make a killing in those hard times, when the old families were beginning to pack their silverware and the gondoliers ferried those latter-day patricians for free; these fallen gentry, ashamed by their circumstances, entered the gondolas directly from their damp lower rooms. Everyone hoped the sun would shine or rain would fall the very next day, but the fog did not lift, and fear moved into the city. People moved through the streets like apparitions and living masks, and they spoke to each other only in Venetian dialect. When they noticed someone who looked like a stranger approaching in the fog, they were to say in Venetian: ‘Be vigilant, a German spy is on the lurk’, and the other was to reply: ‘Vigilant, for king and Fatherland!’ That meant that two good Venetians had passed each other. Unfortunately, German spies still walked the streets despite these precautions. To make matters worse, these spies were not Germans or other foreigners who could easily be recognized by their speech; they were Venetians too, who knew the dialect well and merrily greeted each other with ‘Be vigilant, a German spy is on the lurk’. Everyone was out and about; the musicians still played and sang, and their tiny monkeys beat unceasingly on little cymbals.
Singing was the easiest. Or was it? There were two singers who would no longer sing in 1917, although it could be said that one of them did sing after all, albeit in a strange way. Florrie Forde, the plump, Australian music-hall singer who had replaced the runaway German, Lilian Schmidt, in London didn’t sing a single song in 1917. She continued to hold tea parties and soirées in her sunny flat in Royal Hospital Road all year, but she refused to sing with piano accompaniment again. She pretended to have been indisposed, to have had a few problems with her vocal cords, and said she would be making arrangements for another concert the very next day — she so looked forward to inspiring her devotees from the West End to Edith Grove again. But it was a lie. She w
as lying to herself and others, and she knew it best when she sang ‘Oh, what a Lovely War’ or ‘Daisy Bell’ to herself in the evenings, quietly so that not even the mice in the walls would hear her. After her involvement in what she still called the ‘spy affair’, this plump Australian thus began to pale in people’s memories. The young musicians she so loved now came to visit her ever less; audiences no longer remembered her; and in the end Florrie Forde became a lonely has-been. She lived on a small pension and had to scrimp and save, although she still had a golden voice in her throat.
No one will probably know what Hans-Dieter Huis had in his throat, except the mysterious laryngologist Dr Straube, who worked in a house surrounded by water lilies, canals and reeds, and had prescribed the soldier Huis a strange potion which smelled of tannis root. It made the former baritone mutate, causing his voice to climb to ever higher registers. In 1916, he first became a dramatic tenor, then a buffo tenor and finally a lyric tenor. The whole of Germany, all the way to the trenches on the Western Front, was enthusiastic when the former baritone Hans-Dieter Huis intoned ‘Tuba mirum’ from Mozart’s Requiem like a real German lyric tenor. People put the fluctuations in his voice down to stress, and the soldier Huis was happy for just one evening, and perhaps the two following ones, when the same musicians repeated the Requiem as an encore. Already by the third concert, Huis had problems finishing the ‘Tuba mirum’ because his voice became squeakier and squeakier. It was unstoppable.
Just one week later, he was no longer able to sing the pieces written for lyric tenors, only remnant pages from the baroque period, intended for the historical castrati voice. But now Huis took no pleasure in anything any more. He felt like a man in no-man’s-land, because he knew he would only stay in the register of counter-tenor for a day or two. He spoke in a very high-pitched, wheezy voice when people were still able to hear him. Then Huis became speechless to everyone around him. He didn’t lose his voice, strictly speaking, but it went beyond the range of human hearing. No one could now hear what the once greatest baritone of the German stage was saying. However, Berlin’s dogs could still hear him! The former Don Giovanni soon learnt that those four-legged friends were his sole audience, so he walked the streets and sang with all his might, intoning everything he could remember and everything he could in any way adapt to his unnaturally, inaudible voice. And the Berlin dogs stopped and pricked their ears. Mozart’s arias sounded like divine howling to the canines. Poodles and boxers listened to him, dachshunds and bird dogs, Russian wolfhounds and St Bernards; strays and pampered pet dogs alike soon began to follow Huis as if he were a pied piper enthralling them with his song. All the Berliners thought this was the end — the famous Huis had obviously gone crazy. Inaudible to humans, he paced the streets bareheaded and with his mouth open as if singing, while the dogs followed him in packs and howled as his choristers.
THE REVOLUTION TRAVELS BY TRAIN
It was the beginning of November by the new calendar. Old Europe was dying inch by inch in the fading West - in the frivolities of Paris, the uncertainty of London, the one-sidedness of Berlin, the twilight of Rome and the fires of Vienna. The East, at that time, was also breaking and crumbling like a dilapidated facade, under which the walls of the old Duma and the rotten beams of landowners’ estates were giving way. The masses were arming themselves and preparing for insurrection everywhere from Trieste to Königsberg and from Pécs to Berlin, but the fever was running highest in Petrograd. The first snow fell in early November 1917, when the licentious Russian capital lived out its last Babylonian days.
The gambling clubs where champagne flowed and stakes were raised as high as 25,000 roubles operated feverishly from dusk till dawn. Bejewelled prostitutes draped in precious fur coats walked up and down in the city centre and populated the cafés. Monarchist conspirators and German spies were their clients, as were bold smugglers and worried landowners selling off their properties for a handful of roubles. Many still wanted to halt the mad merry-go-round, to stop and reflect, but feverish Petrograd raced on and on beneath the grey clouds and the first severe frost. Where was it heading?
At the corner of Morskaya Street and Nevsky Prospekt, detachments of soldiers with bayonetted rifles were stopping all private automobiles. They threw out the passengers and ordered the drivers to head for the Winter Palace. A little further along, in front of Kazan Cathedral, it was the same sight: the automobiles were ordered to drive back to Nevsky Prospekt. Just then, five or six sailors appeared with the ribbons of the ships Aurora and Zarya Svobody on their caps. They whispered to the arbitrary traffic policemen: ‘Kronstadt has rebelled, the sailors are coming.’
The Bolshevik Petrograd Soviet was in constant session at the Smolny Institute. Delegates fell to the floor from fatigue and lack of sleep, and then got up again to continue taking part in the debates. On 19 October by the old calendar, or 4 November by the new, the most important revolutionary meeting was held. Comrade Trotsky spoke: ‘The Mensheviks, SRs, Kadets, Kerenskyists, various Danites, buglers of General Kornilov and those who attended ambassador Buchanan’s East-West Divan are of no interest to us.’ Then a delegate of the 3rd Bicycle Battalion stood up: ‘Three days ago, the bicycle corps on the South-Western Front were ordered to move on Petrograd. The order seemed suspicious to us, and at the station in Peredolsk we met the delegates of the 5th Tsarskoye Selo Battalion. We held a joint meeting and established that not one cyclist was willing to give his blood to support the government of the landowners and the bourgeoisie.’ Cries of approval; the enthusiasm crescendoed into the smashing of tables and chairs. Comrade Mikhail Liber tried to calm the atmosphere: ‘Engels and Marx say the proletariat has no right to seize power until it is prepared, and we aren’t prepared yet.’ Cries of protest, and a beer bottle came flying from somewhere near the door. Comrade Maratov, constantly interrupted and shouted down, could hardly hear his own voice: ‘The Internationalists do not oppose the transfer of power to democracy, but they do not agree with the methods of the Bolsheviks.’ Then a tall, bony soldier, whose eyes flashed at the assembled delegates, got up. They called him Lazarus because they had thought for two months that he was dead. ‘The soldier masses no longer trust their officers,’ he said. ‘What are you waiting for?’
What conclusions were reached is not well known. At four in the morning, bands of revolutionaries were seen with rifles in their hands. ‘Let’s go,’ said citizen Zorin. ‘We’ve caught the deputy minister of justice and the minister of religious affairs. The sailors from Kronstadt will be here any time now. The Red Guards are on the streets and intercepting all automobiles with their lights on. There will be no bed for us tonight. Our task is to take over the post and telegraph office, and also the State bank.’
It was Monday, 5 November, and the trams still scudded along Nevsky Prospekt, with men, women and children hanging on to them on all sides. The Hotel Astoria opposite St Isaac’s Cathedral had been requisitioned, and all the proponents of self-management who had made the guests pay for every trifle back in February were dispersed. The only two newspapers on sale were Rabochy Put and Dyen, printed in the occupied editorial office of Russkaya Volya. People resold the papers after reading them, and a small group of confused citizens ran into Captain Gomberg, a Menshevik and the secretary of the military wing of the party. ‘Has there really been an insurrection?’ they asked him, to which he answered: ‘Who the hell knows! The Bolsheviks may be able to seize power, but they won’t hold it for more than three days. How are they going to rule Russia?!’
Everyone wanted to travel again in those days. The trains carried people, but also apparitions. People went out onto the platforms of Petrograd’s Warsaw Railway Station with clothing tied up into round bales, which they rolled in front of them like big balls. There were also elegant passengers, their faces somewhat Turkish-looking, travelling with just one motley camel-hide bag each. In those days, there was a gypsy woman travelling on the trains. She was dressed like a fairground fortune-teller: scarves the colour of borsch
were draped across her enormous chest and three layers of colourful skirts covered her haunches. Her black hair was tied up into a bun and her eyes moved restlessly as she studied the disoriented travellers, but she didn’t tell anyone’s future there in the train compartment. She was starting out from the capital on what seemed a long-planned trip to Tallinn. It took a whole day because some passenger or other was always being thrown out of the train between stations and someone else thrown in. In the afternoon, the train also stopped so that certain officials could be decorated right there in the carriage, and the passengers had no choice but to be the audience at that ‘ceremony’. The gypsy woman endured all this in silence. She didn’t complain or protest like so many others. Late in the afternoon, she finally arrived at her destination: Tallinn railway station. It was the day before the revolution and she had come to see Jaan Anvelt, the president of the Tallinn soviet. Comrade Anvelt had circles under his eyes which came down to his upper lip. He had not slept more than a few hours in all of the previous week. He had completely lost his voice; it had changed to a shrill whisper and seemed it would soon shift to a register so high that only Tallinn’s dogs could hear it.
The Great War Page 42
