‘What can I do for you, major?’ the king asked.
‘Nothing, Your Majesty,’ Tatich answered to the king’s surprise, ‘I’ve come to tell you a story.’
‘A story?’
‘Yes, a soldier’s tale. You may have heard my name, Your Majesty — I am a hero from the Drina and Kaymakchalan. You’ve awarded me three medals: one for the battle on accursed Mount Kaymakchalan in the terrible, biting cold when we charged the Bulgarians with bayonets on St Elijah’s Peak, as I’m sure you know. What you perhaps do not know is that I was at the fore of that assault, as well as every engagement before that, without being scratched by a knife or grazed by a bullet in any of the battles.’
‘Was it luck or something else?’ the king asked.
‘Something else, My King. I had a truly remarkable little mirror. I entrusted all my fears to it, and it saved me from danger, madly brave as I was.’
‘A strange little mirror indeed,’ the king said, ‘and how did you give your fears to it?’
‘There was a frightened me there in the reflection, who consumed all my trembles and shakes, and grew older and older, and left me invulnerable on this side of the glass.’
Then the king inquired in confidence: ‘Would you lend me your little mirror, major? I am afraid of so many things, believe it or not, the chief of which is death.’
‘I can’t, Your Majesty, because I’ve already given the mirror away.’
‘To whom?’
‘To a hero, Major Lyuba Vulovich.’
‘Vulovich . . . that name rings a bell . . . so he is now a hero with your mirror, and you are vulnerable like Achilles with his heel? Anyway, what has become of Vulovich?’
‘He died, Your Majesty.’
‘How? Did the mirror break, or did its effect wear off?’ the king wondered.
‘It seems so, My King. Vulovich’s death was probably inevitable, so not even the mirror could save him.’
‘We’ll raise a monument to him when we return home.’
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
Then the king got up and asked the hero Tatich: ‘Will you not stay for supper? It’s late, and soon the New Year 1918 will be with us.’
‘I can’t, Your Majesty,’ Major Tatich declined, ‘I promised my friend that I would inform you of his end, which I have duly done. Now I need to hurry: the overnight express train to Salonika leaves in less than an hour, and I have leave only until morning. Farewell.’
And with that, Tatich left. He saw in the New Year 1918 by himself on a platform of Athens railway station. The train arrived one hour after midnight. Tatich got up. ‘There, my friend. I‘ve kept my promise. I even knelt before the king, but he too had forgotten you,’ he muttered to himself, and entered the train.
1917, the year of the tsar, came to an end in Ipatiev Palace in Yekaterinburg. Tsar Nicholas and his family saw in the New Year eating from an odd assortment of plates. His fork clanked against the side of the china — like in the visions of his dreamers in the future — and he prepared to act like a coward in asphyxiating himself by intentionally swallowing a fishbone.. He chose a suitable one, looked down the table and was silently taking his leave of each of the children, when he stopped. He recalled the words of the philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov: “The spirit of brotherhood should not be limited to the people living here and now. Humankind is a whole, and the spirit of fraternization must be extended to the dead — ‘our fathers’.” Nicholas spat out the suicide fishbone and smiled at Anastasia, who looked at him as if she understood everything immediately. He kept eating and remembered the thinker, Vladimir Solovyov, who had foreseen that the followers of Christ would be reduced to an oppressed minority without the power to impose their will on others. All earthly power would thus pass into the hands of the Antichrist. What did that mean to him on the last day of 1917, imprisoned in Yekaterinburg and surrounded by guards who were celebrating New Year’s Eve in the next room and bellowing like wild beasts? What did it mean to him that Solovyov also foresaw the unification of all Christians before the end of the twentieth century and their ultimate triumph on earth? He decided he would kill himself and wait with Fyodorov in the galley of the dead for those new Christians in the two thousandth year. The dead tsar and the dead philosopher would join them there. Again he readied the white, thorn-like suicide bone, pushed it to the back of his palate . . . and then gave up like a coward once more. The whole of 1917, the year of the deposed tsar, had been like this, he thought: like a fish which offered its bones and rubbery back to everyone who wanted to choke themselves. He would kill himself the following year as soon as Tsarevich Alexei had regained a little strength, he thought, but he was deluding himself. And in that illusion ended the year of that tsar without a tsardom.
1918
THE YEAR OF THE CRIMINOLOGIST
Military hospital in Britain, and rows of H1N1 flew patients, 1918
THE END – KAPUT
‘What has this war done to people? As a criminologist, I had expected that it would turn people into animals and even reconciled myself to the fact at the bottom of my justice-loving heart. Nor was it necessary to be a psychologist or clairvoyant to tell that it would turn people into cowards. But the realization that it can turn a person into a poisonous and cynical intellectual gave me quite a fright recently. I came back from Corfu after three weeks of watching Serbian politicians savagely fight for power and provoke one ministerial crisis after another. Disgusted that the Serbian name, unblemished on the battlefield, was being sullied in this way, I myself was ashamed, although I am a native of Switzerland. I walked the streets of Salonika, fed the pigeons and thought I would never speak a word to anyone again.
‘Quite unexpectedly, however, an outwardly amiable and genteel Serb came into my life. We soon became friends, but I have to admit I was careless. When I think back to the first few hours of our friendship, I realize that I only asked questions, like every foreigner, and he, like a real Balkan gentleman, never tired of replying. I thought I had finally found a proper intellectual: we spoke long and passionately about ancient Greece and her bronze heroes, with much old stone verse, especially Homer, which that amiable officer surprisingly knew by heart. Perhaps it was his reciting of that archaic Hellenic language which captivated me. Admittedly I’ve also read Homer in Greek, but I’ve never been gifted with an encyclopaedic memory for verse, even entire poems, in my own or any other language. My new friend was evidently quite unlike me. The first verse of the Iliad rang in my ears: “Menin aeide, Thea, Peleiadeo Akhileos oulomenen, e muri Akhaiois alge etheke”, and in Greece it resonated with greater force and solemnity than it would have anywhere else.
‘After a few days had passed, this newcomer began to reveal himself and increasingly brag about his speculative knowledge. Ever more often I caught him in superficialities, flimsy contradictions and insidious conclusions, be it about Nietzsche and other modern philosophers or Beethoven and his successors. But there was nothing I could do to get rid of him, and a good part of the blame certainly lies with me. He came to my little flat every day determined to spend time with me, as if he didn’t notice my growing sense of discomfort. Once we went for a little excursion to the south, to the pretty Peloponnesian beaches and the glittering Aegean which hugs them, and there he told me all sorts of things. A second time we went for a walk in an olive grove on the northern outskirts of Salonika, where he told me enthusiastically that every wood he enters reminds him of Beethoven’s forest from the Pastoral Symphony, which beautifully imitates the chirping of birds. What birds, what symphony?! We were just one month away from the great offensive on the Salonika Front, intended to obliterate everything which still had a toehold on life. Perhaps it was that proximity of death, and nothing else, which prompted young Kapetanovich to enlist me as one of his confidants and tell me his life history. It strangely resembled his glib, self-satisfied opinions.
‘He started back in the last century, but I’ll spare you the petty-bourgeois flights of fancy from his he
roic childhood. When his tale and that of his family reached 1914, I got quite a fright because young Kapetanovich didn’t think of omitting any of his depravities. He only sanitized things to the extent of covering them with a layer of moral make-up and trying to present them in the best light. Like so many from the Balkans, he probably considered that I was a naive foreigner and would accept everything at face value. He told me most openly: “The truth is, my good Mr Reiss, that I never intended to die in this war. But is that a shortcoming? You’ll say it’s cowardice, but I would reply that it’s a heroism which will be celebrated. Look at it this way: millions have been killed, and tens of thousands more will join them this year. Whoever went out to challenge death at the wild River Drina and on the slopes of Mount Suvobor in 1914 can no longer be alive today, you’ll agree. And the dead, my good sir, are remembered by no one. The best way is to hide away, like I did, and then to join in the final battle — looking after number one, of course — and march in with the victors. You’re talking to a future Serbian hero here, let that be clear. But since you and I are friends, I can tell you: I’ve never really been a hero.”
‘After that prelude, I had to admit that all the arguments were on his side. The capricious fellow seemed to know that and went on to tell me how his illustrious contribution to the war effort began. He arrived in Shabac the day before the Great War started, on 29 July 1914 by the Serbian calendar, driving his father’s automobile. A child of rich parents. He was wearing an ironed, grey-blue reserve officer’s uniform. One glance beyond the limousine’s footboard was enough to seduce the major’s virtuous wife, Ruzha. He invited her to get in and took her for a drive around Shabac, then they went into a wood by the River Sava. He repeated to her, too, that every forest always reminded him of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and then they made promises to each other and came up with a plan. That ruined the life of a major and took the major’s wife off into the unknown. And listen how the culprit lamented about it four years down the track: “You mustn’t overlook, sir, that I also did Ruzha a favour. What would she have had if she didn‘t meet me? She would have become a widow in the first week of the war one way or another. This way she was at least free, and eloping gave her a fresh lease of womanhood. Like in the picaresque novels which libertine ladies have devoured since time immemorial. I mean, who would dare say that I used her? I took her with me to Bitola, where my father had arranged me a posting as far away as possible from the Front. Oh, how I enjoyed my time with her. She was all mine: like a moth which flies around a flame. She cast away her old life — lock, stock and barrel — and no longer had anyone to call her own. But, as you can imagine, it soon began to bore me. I left Bitola very quickly, towards the end of September. Without her, of course. Later I was told that she was looking for me, and that she quickly declined and ended up outside the church as a beggar woman, lying to naive people about having been ruined through no fault of her own. But what did that have to do with me? I never promised her a secure old age, only another fling of youth, and that’s what she got: my youth, Mr Archibald, for three weeks. She has to make good by herself for the rest, isn’t that right?”
‘This really has gone too far, I thought, but instead of protesting I kept quiet, and Kapetanovich continued his tale. He told me he had been a member of the Serbian parliament since 1914 and adduced this as another reason why he would eventually end up as a hero. It was he, together with Velizar Vulovich, who proposed the disgraceful law allowing members of parliament to be called up but not sent to the front line, which he justified with the logic of the probable and the necessary. Then there was the story about the parliament being transferred from sunny Corfu to even sunnier Nice. That was the shameful episode where those shirkers, who were meant to be representing a heroic, warrior nation, thought the island of Corfu wasn’t comfortable enough, and perhaps not safe enough, so they decided to shift their seat to the Côte d’Azur. My friend Kapetanovich had a fine excuse for this too: “What would have happened if we’d have stayed on Corfu? The government would have dragged us into its whirlpool of factional squabbling and we wouldn’t have been able to make sober decisions for the good of our displaced nation. No, Dr Reiss, we had to move further away from Serbia in order to regard it properly, as a whole, to love it even more and decide what was best for it.”
‘After two winters of parliamentary contentment on the Côte d’Azur, my young friend returned to Salonika after all. He came right on the eve of the decisive offensive, probably in order to prepare for heroic deeds in the Great War, as planned. And that brings us up to the present day. Young Mr Kapetanovich is ready to return to freshly liberated Belgrade, which he described to me as a city of doom and gloom (“Imagine who has survived there: human abominations and moral degenerates”), but he also seems to be itching to go. I didn’t believe my friends and didn’t have confidence in the military might of the enemy, but I still thought: he can’t go riding into Belgrade just like that. He’ll be met by a stray bullet with his name on it, even if he’s surrounded by a hundred staff members and officers. So I said to him: “Goodbye, Mr Kapetanovich. I hope Belgrade will be at least a little nicer than you expect.”’
‘I bid my mother goodbye. She had snarled at me: I hope they catch you today. I’m not taking you down to the Baudeocque for an illicit abortion, and I’m not coming to look after you. She called me a “slattern” and a “strumpet” and threw me out into the street. Take me back, Foujita, please. I get wet thinking of you. Your sweetheart, Kiki.’ Alice Ernestine Prin, alias Kiki, wrote this on the back of a greasy calling card with two or three spots of red wine, and tried to have it passed via ten hands to Foujita the painter, who was sitting in a happy circle of drinkers at the other end of the Café de la Rotonde. Kiki’s name wasn’t on it, of course — she never had a calling card of her own; it belonged to a stained-glass artist, who wrote his important name with a flourish: Pierre-Henri-Michel Orlan. The first pair of hands accepted the card and understood where it had to go, but the second and third pair of hands diverted it a little from Foujita’s direction, and the fifth and sixth pair sent it straight to the bar; where, like a stray lamb, it was seized by Old Libion. He took the card in his meaty hands, read the message and began to snigger. Then he read it aloud: ‘I bid my mother goodbye . . . I get wet thinking of you. Your sweetheart, Kiki.’ Then he turned over the card and, as if he didn’t realize that Kiki had written it to Foujita, yelled out: ‘Is there anyone here by the name of Pierre-Henri . . . just a minute, Pierre-Henri-Michel Orlan? Where are you Orlan? Pipe up, you lucky dick, this girl is creaming herself at the thought of you!’
The whole café burst out laughing, Kiki sank deeper into the man’s coat she was cloaked in, and Foujita didn’t as much as cast a glance towards the bar. So ended another of Kiki’s romances. She was homeless again. She would have to sleep at her friend Eva’s. Eva had a little room in Plaisance with a metal bedside table and a double bed of brass rods, which was big enough to sleep three. Eva was not a prostitute, or at least she claimed not to be. She didn’t make love for money; in the last year of the war she made do with food, tins of ‘Madagascar’, and even the odd, not exactly aromatic sausage she had been given by a cavalier. Kiki was still young, and yet she felt her life had reached a dead end; she had arrived at a wall with dishevelled trees jutting up from behind it and there was no way through — but then the last German offensive began. It was 21 March 1918. The dull rumble of long-range artillery could be heard even in the centre of Paris. After the defeat of the French Northern Army Group at Chemin des Dames, the Germans were once more only twenty kilometres from the capital. Georges Clemenceau decided to replace General Guillaume, Commander of the Eastern Army Group, and General d’Espèrey, Commander of the Northern Army Group. Paris was under siege again. The Germans had a fine view of the city from the hill of Montparnasse until, after a morning drizzle, it became enveloped in thick fog.
The Parisians seemed to go mad with fear and uncertainty in that spring haze. Their str
ange behaviour was not so visible on the first day, but when the wisps of mist hadn’t lifted by noon on the second it became clear that people had turned wild and voracious. It was first noticed on the Pont d’Austerlitz: strangers out walking went up to each other. He would say: ‘I am Jean Fabro, a picture-framer, and from now on your husband.’ She would answer: ‘I am Hana Mendiczka, a linotypist, a Polish refugee, and glad to be your wife,’ and they would take each other by the hand as if they were a couple that had been seeing each other for a long time. On the other side of the bridge it was the same sight. He said: ‘I am Roger Rubod, a variety-show actor, a clown to be precise, and I’m your husband’. She replied: ‘I am Bernarda Lulo, a cab driver and I’m all yours.’ One couple was just like another. As soon as someone went onto the Pont d’Austerlitz and met a stranger coming from the opposite direction, they had a new partner. All of a sudden no one was alone; husbands cheated on their wives there on the bridge, and wives left their husbands in the blink of an eye.
People who were not yet love-struck heard about this affliction and hurried to the Pont d’Austerlitz, but there was no need to jostle there because a similar phenomenon was soon to be observed on the Pont National, Pont du Alexandre III and finally on one of the oldest bridges over the Seine, the Pont Royal. Soon everyone became everyone else’s companion in Paris. In the four days the fog oppressed the city, everyone found alternative partners, but they never went all the way in their adultery. They petted and passionately embraced, hidden in the fog; women wantonly raised a leg and wrapped it around the men while they were kissing, but the couples from under the bridges split up after a few blocks or neighbourhoods, as if their parading was only for the benefit of that pervasive fog. Even so, for many it was beautiful because men who were far from handsome hugged belles just because they met them in the middle of a bridge, and pale wormettes from the suburbs walked with cavaliers two heads taller than themselves all the way along Boulevard Haussmann. Everyone wanted to find a ‘partner in the mist’.
The Great War Page 45
