When they finally arrived, the tsar didn’t recognize this house from his dreams either and again ordered that the family not unpack. They set off on the third leg of their journey separately: first of all the tsar and tsaritsa, then the children. This last journey by ox-cart to Yekaterinburg took almost a week, but when they all finally arrived at Ipatiev Palace, which looked just like the dreamers had seen it, the tsar finally allowed the family to unpack. It was to be their home — their last home — but still a home.
Grand duke Nicholas also found a new home, in the Crimea. He was still considered the generalissimo, and many continued to see him as commander, but he felt like a broken man. So much had come to pass: the abdication of his brother, ten days commanding the Russian forces, being relieved of his duties again, and then his deportation to the Crimea where he was to be kept in complete isolation. He remembered the six-day odyssey by train from Mogilev to Kiev, from Kiev to Petrograd, and from Petrograd all the way to the small station of Simferopol. There he was met by men in an armoured car. ‘It’s for your safety, Majesty –,’ they told him, ‘the streets are crawling with bandits these days.’ the grand duke was able to see a small excerpt of the surroundings through the driver’s window-slit in the metal plate. He caught a glimpse of palms, orange trees, oleander and bougainvillea, and thought a revolution would be impossible in a natural paradise like the Crimea, but he was mistaken.
He was confined to a large colonial house on the outskirts of Sevastopol. Once it had probably been a beautiful house in Moorish style, coated with vines and nestled in a birch grove, but after the death of its last owner it had rapidly begun to deteriorate. The garden around the house was overgrown with weeds and had merged with the surrounding forest. The huge rooms were dark and damp, the wallpaper was torn; dirty, yellowish water dripped from the taps, and large black beetles teemed by the neglected, half-ruined pool. Soon after taking him there, they placed sentries around the house and gave him an old Tatar man and a lady as servants. Those two quiet and industrious people soon put the house in some semblance of order, and the grand duke was able to feel like a nobleman again, albeit one under house arrest.
He couldn’t go outside and wasn’t allowed to go for strolls along the riviera, and to begin with he wasn’t allowed to receive visitors, but none of the restrictions were of great duration. Sevastopol was far from the October unrest, and the soldiers on sentry duty were lazy and easily bribed. The city was under the nominal control of the Bolsheviks, but every little while Cossacks would come on a plundering spree and no one dared to lay a finger on them. The grand duke’s sentries therefore saw no reason not to turn a blind eye or two. Soon they let him do everything he wanted as long as their superiors who were far away didn’t notice.. Later they pretended to be gentlemen and admirers of the royal family, and in the end they almost became batmen and porters for Nicholas. They ushered in delegations and announced them with an air of importance: ‘Admiral Kolchak, Commander-in-Chief of the Black Sea Fleet’, ‘the Cossack gentleman from Kuban oblast’, ‘the esteemed representatives of the city of Yalta’, ‘His Reverend Bishop Vasily of Crimea,’ and so forth.
But what audiences they were with such savages! Disorderly, dissolute and disturbing men came to see the duke, proposing that he take command of this and that. On Monday, it was Admiral Kolchak. He came up to Nicholas in dirty trousers and muddy boots, repeating ‘Forgive me, forgive me, My Tsar’. As he spoke, he shot arrows from his dark eyes on bloodshot whites, and proposed that Nicholas take charge of the Crimean fleet, making it sound like a threat and leaving him no choice. On Tuesday, the Cossacks who had recently plundered parts of the city came to see him. They had curly, unkempt beards like satyrs and had sabres poorly cleansed of blood . . . and called on him to revive the Russian Empire! On Wednesday, it was a delegation from the city of Yalta. Three leading female citizens in patched, pre-war redingotes sat opposite the duke, and when they were brought the weak tea and a few insipid buckwheat cakes made by his industrious Tatar housekeeper, they tucked in as if they hadn’t eaten for days. Only after the third cup of tea did they tell him that Yalta was an old and rich city, that everything was alright there despite it being in the hands of the Bolsheviks, and that they would like the grand duke to become their fellow citizen and leave that measly house so close to Sevastopol! On Thursday, he again received some careworn soul who had turned grey overnight, on Friday once again someone with traces of blood on their clothes, and on Saturday the Bishop of Crimea, immersed in disappointment and clad in fanaticism.
There had been no end of audiences and receptions for Nicholas in Tsarskoye Selo at the beginning of 1917, and now, towards the end of that unhappy year, it was the same for the grand duke. Things were no better on the opposite, Bolshevik side. Every Ivan was receiving every Vladimir or going by train to rounds of negotiations in those days. People who would never have slept, eaten or even drunk tea together now negotiated with each other daily. Hyenas negotiated with lions, but the hyenas donned lion skins, and lions grinned like hyenas. Leon Trotsky, the one for whom the unknown drunk in Geneva had predicted persecution and death in indifferent foreign climes, was at the peak of his power in 1917. As people’s commissar for foreign affairs, he set off for Brest-Litovsk to conduct talks with the Germans and Turks on ending the Great War on the Eastern Front.
He too travelled by rail. One month after the revolution, his train was no longer running several days late, nor did anyone hold it up bandit-like in the middle of nowhere.. In a comfortably furnished coach of the former tsarist government, Comrade Trotsky sat alone at a large desk lit by a lamp with a green glass-shade. It was 22 December 1917; Soviet Russia had concluded an armistice with the Central Powers, and the commissar thought the peace negotiations with them would now be just a formality. He too looked out through the window at the frozen Russian earth, and it seemed to him that even the meagre winter green he saw grew differently under the new system. He had completely forgotten the drunk in Geneva. In his leather suit, with his knobbly face, short goatee beard and moustache, he was now completely in step with his time and felt that nothing could throw him off balance; but he was mistaken.
Only a few people were waiting for him when he arrived at the station in Brest-Litovsk. There were German and Turkish soldiers, and among the small group of travellers who seemed to be stranded there on the Belorussian-Polish border he noticed four strange figures.
The first was a scrawny little gentleman. His tweed suit fastened with the slender belt of his jacket, his nervous shifting from one leg to the other and his vagabond appearance made him the very caricature of a Russian abroad. This traveller’s hair was as yellow as straw, his lips raspberry red, pouted and much too full for a man, and his eyes moved erratically as if the optic nerves were not completely in control.
Immediately next to him stood a corpulent woman. She was built like a pear: the pointy crown of her head spread down into full, chubby cheeks; her thick neck continued into huge, flabby breasts, which drooped down to her belly; and this was connected to her sagging behind. She was dressed in skirts and wrapped in scarves like a traditional Russian woman, and her fat buttocks stood out from under her skirt just like the bulging bottom of an enormous red pear.
Next to her there stood a man who could not possibly be Russian. He was a proud foreigner, as straight as a ramrod, with blue eyes and the look of a stuffed bird. He had reading glasses, glasses for special occasions, glasses for the winter. One pair popped into his pocket and another was put on his nose — all the better to see Comrade Trotsky with.
The last stranger in the group struck people’s commissar Trotsky as being a German. He had cheeks like inflated silk balloons covered with tiny red veins. He breathed with difficulty, had high blood pressure, and it looked as if winter didn’t agree with him. The Russian winter in particular. He seemed to have been waiting for Trotsky too, for quite some time. He was wearing a leather coat, on top of which he had donned two long fur coats reaching down to the
soles of his boots. These pelts of polar fox and sable on top of his portly body made him look like some kind of strange bear.
This fourth figure, of such strange appearance, immediately headed towards people’s commissar Trotsky, and the others followed suit. It seemed they wanted to speak to him before the Germans did. Trotsky wanted to hide from them, but where? Now they surrounded him on all sides, and he was at their mercy. They touched him and prodded him and whispered in his ear: ‘It will be far from straightforward, Comrade Trotsky, it won’t be easy at all.’ He wanted to run away from them, but fortunately they moved away themselves and proceeded to watch him from a respectful distance with expressions of parental fondness. When the representatives of the German Supreme Command finally came up to Trotsky, the fourth figure was still watching him from a safe distance. They had smiles on their lips and tears in their eyes as if they were seeing him off on a long and uncertain journey.
After several days of talks, people’s commissar Trotsky realized that it wouldn’t be easy and that the path of negotiations would be full of pitfalls. He had come to demand the restoration of the pre-war situation, but the Germans wouldn’t hear of it because they considered themselves the victors. After seven days, the negotiations were suspended so the Germans could return to their families and see in the New Year. 1918. Trotsky decided to take the opportunity to return to Moscow and give Lenin the first report from the negotiations. He went to the Brest-Litovsk railway station and saw that accursed group-of-four there again. They didn’t want to surround him now, nor did they think of coming up to him; he just had the impression that their faces were sadder this time.
Back in Moscow, Trotsky naturally forgot about the Western New Year’s Eve, and also about those four figures. There had been so much work that he had only slept a few hours a day, sitting at his desk.
Adolf Hitler, the courier of the List Regiment, saw in the New Year 1918 in good cheer. He had been on leave in Berlin and returned to the Front with a jotter full of drawings and plans. In that notebook he ‘reorganized’ the National Gallery. Hitler did not see why the work of the Bavarian painter Peter von Cornelius was given prominence of place at the expense of artists he considered much greater, such as Adolph von Menzel and the Austrian Moritz von Schwind. He therefore took his notepad and drew up a new plan for the National Gallery; he, the great rearranger, now moved Menzel and Schwind to the central hall, while Cornelius was shifted to a side room. He told his comrades this was just the beginning and that he intended to do over the whole of Berlin, to which they roared with drunken laughter again and showered him with mouthfuls of beer.
The last Austrian emperor decided to spend New Year’s Eve with his victorious units at the Italian Front. He made the decision on the spur of the moment and arrived at the banks of the River Piava virtually unannounced, so that his subordinates were unable to clear all the dead from his path. The emperor was a little surprised and felt awkward — they were dead people, after all — but he found the strength to greet the bravest offensive unit of Captain Erwin Rommel as befitted heroes.
New Year’s Eve in Paris was cheerful. Old Libion from the Rotonde, Old Combes from the Closerie des Lilas and Old Cambon from the Dôme agreed to share the welcoming in of what they hoped would be the last year of the war: from seven till nine at Libion’s, from nine till midnight at Combes’s, and the New Year 1918 at Cambon’s. When the merry procession of all the artists who had also been at Kisling’s wedding set off at nine, they could still walk in a straight line; when they left the Closerie des Lilas for the once despised Dôme at midnight, they were already staggering and tottering. When they came out of the Dôme before daybreak, most of them were vomiting. Apollinaire had drunk and eaten a lot. He started to vomit and eject whole chunks of country-style sausage he hadn’t digested. A skinny dog came running up and started greedily eating the meat, to which the drunkard wisely said: ‘I knew I’d eaten sausage, but I had no idea I’d eaten a whole dog.’
At midnight, Kiki de Montparnasse passionately kissed the painter Foujita. She closed her eyes and ran her little tongue over his lips, but in her thoughts she already imagined she’d met someone new. As she was kissing him she thought: a fog has fallen on Paris and everyone thinks they can have whoever they find in the street. She sauntered over the Pont Royal, and her new gallant was coming right towards her. Let it be a photographer this time. That’s modern now!
At the New Year 1918, the living forty-eight per cent of the still-breathing Fritz Haber envied the dead fifty-two per cent.
How Florrie Forde and Hans-Dieter Huis saw in the New Year 1918 is not worth mentioning. The silence surrounding them was heavier than death.
Boina saw in the New Year 1918 quietly and far from danger, he thought, but he was mistaken. On New Year’s Eve, his medals resolved to kill him. How those pieces of sapphire, topaz and gilded nickel came up with the idea is hard to say. It’s easier to describe how they intended to do it. They hoped the field marshal would receive an invitation to a celebration from a chief of staff or a young officer he was fond of; as commanding officer, he would then be sure to don his dress uniform. They — the medals he hadn’t worn for a long time — expected that he would pin them to it, and then they would have the chance to stab him to death with their needles and the sharp points of their crosses, thus taking revenge for his inexcusable disregard of them. Boina had received a whole cupboard full of decorations but many of them had never been worn in public. It was quite unforgiveable. It therefore had to be a New Year’s Eve celebration, perhaps a ball in Trieste, and he should receive an invitation and say to himself: ‘Now we’re going to get dressed up.’ But had he not sworn the previous year of the war, when he went to the Piazza della Borsa all dressed up and felt that his faithful medals were pricking him, that he would never wear his dress uniform again? That’s right, and that made the task difficult. The medals couldn’t attach themselves to the uniform without help. Fortunately there were a number of junior officers who had dealings with Boina and were on the side of the neglected decorations’ in the sense that, from Christmas onwards, they encouraged their commander to dress up for the senior officers’ New Year’s Eve ball as befitted a commander-in-chief, which would mean putting on all the medals he never wore. The medals counted on that. The ringleaders among the disappointed decorations were St Mary’s Cross of the Order of Teutonic Knights, the Austro-Hungarian Silver Bar with Swords, the Golden Medal of the Ottoman Empire, the Mecklenburg-Schwerin Service Cross, the Star of Merit of the Red Cross Society and the Prussian Medal for Service. At first, everything went as the medals had hoped. The invitation came. Boina took out both his uniforms, both helmets of black Bakelite with plumes and both pairs of boots which shone like black gypsy eyes. He began to get dressed . . . and then suddenly stopped. He decided to go to the party in his uniform without epaulettes, without a helmet and without a single medal, almost like an ordinary soldier. That evening he was the star of Below’s table, and the decorations he left to pine in the dark had to wait for another opportunity — one which would never eventuate.
The Red Baron celebrated his last New Year’s Eve in the pilots’ canteen. The kisses of his sweetheart were as intoxicating as death. Her lips clung to his and it seemed they were fused together forever. The girl’s lips tasted of overripe cherries and, although he saw no good in that, they allured him to kiss them more.
Zhivka the seamstress saw in the New Year 1918 with her son in her arms. She had begun to teach Eugene some first words, but instead of ‘Mama’ or ‘aunty’ (there was no mention of a father) the very first thing he said was something like: ‘ta-ta-tasche’
Sergei Chestukhin spent New Year’s Eve by the Julian calendar at home in his house. He read in a magazine that shoes would be changed once a month in Soviet Russia, and a few minutes before midnight he woke Marusya with the words: ‘Marusya, dear Marusya, happy new 1918 to you. And for the New Year 1919, you and I will have ten pairs of shoes each!’ Marusya asked him if that mea
nt that everyone in the new Russia would have twenty feet, to which Sergei only laughed and let her go back to sleep.
The grand duke saw in the New Year in Sevastopol. He was not looking forward to it, and not a single smile flitted across his stony face. As if the New Year 1918 was yet another onerous audience he had to give. What had he achieved in the year that was ending? He hadn’t moved to Yalta, hadn’t accepted a single phantom appointment, and had declined all honours as if he was brushing away cobwebs or dispelling apparitions. He saw that his departure from Russia was drawing near and he felt that the only things he would miss in the obtuse world abroad were his unique borzoi hunting dogs, which he would certainly not be able to take with him.
The Sukhomlinovs were . . . but they are no longer worth mentioning in these chronicles.
Shortly before the New Year 1918, King Peter received an unusual visitor. This stranger in the uniform of a Serbian major did not come before the king like the others: with a mixture of annoyance and indignity at having to bring a matter before the old ruler which he was in no position to act on. Now it was exactly the opposite. Major Radoyica Tatich, a hero of many battles, had to wait in Athens for three days for the old man to give him an audience. First the king’s staff had neglected to inform him that the major was coming, and then Peter had to see off several top-level delegations, whose members nodded with such nonchalance that the flies on their foreheads and cheeks saw no reason to fly away. As it turned out, the king received Major Tatich on the last day of 1917 by the Julian calendar.
The Great War Page 44
