Kiki too plunged into that love haze, but how different everything was now: in a world of the abnormal, she became normal. In the middle of the Pont Royal she met a young man with an elderly forehead and sideburns, but with lively boyish eyes. He said to her with a strong American accent: ‘I am Emmanuel Radnitzky, a photographer, and this is my first time in Paris. I’ve just been here for a few days, but I’d like to be your admirer’. She answered: ‘I am Alice Prin, but everyone knows me as Kiki de Montparnasse; I want you to be my protector’. And so the only real love of those four days was born; a passion which was not merely posing for the fog. Kiki became the lover of a photographer, the future surrealist Man Ray. Later he would return to America and did not move back to Paris until after the Great War, but that is a story from a different time.
Manfred von Richthofen also saw a story from a different time on his last sortie on 21 April 1918, a tale told in vivid and unforgettable closing images. That day, the Red Baron was shot down by ground fire from Australian troops — by complete chance, for no reason, and not determined in any way by freak of circumstance or whim of history. He, who was unequalled in the air, who decimated the Royal Flying Corps and was infamous in Britain for having killed the greatest British pilot, Lanoe George Hawker, was brought down by a small-calibre round fired by an almost illiterate infantryman.
Could that whimsical knot of circumstance have been foreseen? The lips of Richthofen’s sweetheart didn’t tell him anything that last day: they were dry, crisp like autumn leaves and kissed him gently, but they didn’t afford him the slightest protection. He spent the last night in his room at the base in Ostend. He looked at the walls where he had scribbled the markings of the British and French planes he had shot down; above him hung a gas lamp hidden behind the propeller and part of the motor of Major Hawker’s plane, casting him in a sallow light. He couldn’t sleep even that last night of his life. How many pilots had he turned into minced meat? He liked to think he couldn’t remember their faces and that only the number of planes he shot down was important to him, but his insomnia, trembling and hallucinations brought it home to him that this wasn’t true.
He was almost relieved when he was brought down by erratic fire from the Australian lines the next day. This must be the end, he thought; he was certain of it. The propeller stopped and the rudder no longer responded. He looked in the direction in which he was starting to plunge and saw the slanting line leading to the ground; he realized he would be leaving this world in a number of seconds, a minute at the most, and thought he could finally relax; but then something happened which the mortally-wounded pilot could in no way have expected. On that nose-dive into nothingness, strange aircraft began to close in on the Red Baron’s triplane and zoom past.
First of all, he saw a biplane quite like the planes from the Great War, but of infinitely more modern design: with a broad fuselage, larger engine and a metallic front. The plane had German markings, so the dying pilot thought it was a new model made for use late in the war. But why then had they not let him use it first? He almost felt offended as the new aircraft began coming up to him. The next one had a revolutionary new design: the swept upper wings and very short lower ones told him that biplanes would very soon turn into monoplanes; the heart-shaped tail bore a strange symbol unfamiliar to him, like a crooked or folded cross. Only now did he realize what was happening in the last few seconds of his life: he was plummeting to his death but passing forwards through time and seeing the new flying machines of the future. Could there be a nicer end for a fighter ace of the Great War?
The god of the air, the demiurge, the greatest aviator of them all, sent him a procession of planes from the future as a last salute. Richthofen sank back in his seat and watched those airborne wonders approaching him from the horizon. Here were some small, rounded planes made completely of metal. They had one wing bent back like a swallow’s and moved through the sky with such incredible ease. Now another strange craft was coming towards him. It had an unusual antenna in the centre of its wing, and a little to the left of it was a long fuselage like a metal cigar ending in a powerful propeller engine. But where did the pilot sit? He was in a capsule positioned a little to the right of the central aerial. What a strange flying machine, but weirder things were still to come: planes without propellers and powered by jet engines completely unknown to him. One strange model with the German coat of arms and that strange crooked cross on the tail looked like a large, elongated egg. The pilot sat at the front in the fully-glazed capsule, with five jet engines arranged around and above him, and three below. That plane looked more like a time machine than an aircraft, he thought — it was so fast.
Richthofen looked around in confusion. The ground was ever closer now. He only managed to cross paths with one more German plane. But was it a plane? The central part of the fuselage had a rotating hub with three wings, at the ends of which were those remarkable jet engines set at an angle of ninety degrees in relation to the fuselage. Their propulsion made the hub turn with incredible speed and it looked to him like a huge, rotating wheel encircling the fuselage. There were no longer wings or a tail on that aircraft, but he didn’t have time to gaze into that astonishing future any more. His plane thudded into the parapet of an Australian trench. He felt a second of unbearable pain, which quickly passed. Now he was ashamed that he seemed all sticky and bloody beneath his leather coat. Some soldiers came running, not knowing whom they had brought down, and the swollen mouth of Manfred von Richthofen, full of blood and broken teeth, only managed to say: ‘Kaput.’
THE PANDEMIC
The smallest hero of this novel is undoubtedly a virus. This hero is unable to speak, does not have the faculty to love and hate, and therefore cannot be a proper protagonist. But it does not distinguish good from evil, attacks its host with abandon, and as such can be considered a sinister anti-hero. Moreover, the virus is also able to travel, which is undeniably a good basis for a story — the story of the path of a mutated H1N1 virus. This tale, told largely by cold graphs with the numbers of infections and deaths, probably begins in China. Reliable witnesses would not stake their reputation on it, but with a mug of good black beer in hand they would loudly dispute the thesis that the virus mutated and become deadly in Kansas, at the local army bases for training young American soldiers for the Great War. There was evidence enough that the virus had started out from China. That’s right, in the forests of China, or on the islands of Fiji, or somewhere else in Asia, which for centuries had been a source of caravan contagions and sailors’ diseases. The Pacific Ocean was the cradle of this killer, and only later — the reliable eyewitnesses would agree — did it arrive in America.
The virus scaled sunny Vallejo Street in old San Francisco, which has no shadow at any time of the day, and infected twelve families there. The Jews among them coughed in Yiddish, the Italians seemed to sing ‘Caruso’ through their tears, and the Poles suffered in a strange mixture of a dry northern European cough and a migrant’s expulsion of phlegm. Then the virus moved into Russian Hill and there infected the whole Russian population. Good, taciturn people who didn’t know a word of English came down with a high temperature and a chill. They stoked their tin stoves with the crooked chimneys, wrapped themselves up in whatever they had — old rags or colourful scarves — and the women put on a dozen skirts even though it was midsummer. These hard-working people didn’t speak with anyone, in Russian or English, but the disease still spread to the artists’ ateliers on top of the hills with lovely views down over the gleaming San Francisco Bay. The virus also made a showing in the piano-equipped atelier of the sculptor César Santini, who would take it further into the Continent.
Now not even those reliable witnesses would dispute that the disease had emerged at the army training bases in Kansas, however many mugs of strong black beer they drank. The soldiers who were being prepared for the Great War were young and strong, however, so the pale hue of their faces and their slight coughing was not seen as an obstacle for them to be sent
to the Western Front to be killed there. They all started together, the healthy and the sick, by ship across the Atlantic, and soon after the first combat they infected French soldiers near Brest.
At that time, London was still in good cheer. Everyone found a reason to dance, sing or have some fun in the last year of the war. Young musicians came and went at Sylvia Sparrow’s house, many satisfied faces dined at the Savoy and the Scott’s Arms as if there wasn’t a war going on, and the only person who did not partake of that feverish merrymaking in blithe ignorance of Spanish Influenza was Florrie Forde. This once fiery Australian sat silently in her flat in Royal Hospital Road. In the evenings, she would wind up the old gramophone in her room illuminated by a red lamp and listen to the only two records she had managed to record before the Great War. Nothing seemed likely to change in the life of this singer whom all had forgotten, but then Florrie got it into her head that her punishment should end.
She set off for her encounter with fate the same day as Captain Joseph Sylers felt the first symptoms of Spanish Influenza coming on. He had returned home to London from Brest, and Florrie was asked by some old friends to sing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ again, for a decorated war veteran. She thought of declining, but unfortunately she agreed. A small performance, her first in almost two years, was arranged to take place at Sylvia Sparrow’s. The captain arrived in London and spent the night at his bachelor flat. It was his second night with the virus in his lungs, which had come from the forests of China, or from Fiji. He slept and didn’t think he was sick. Only that afternoon, when he put on his dress uniform and set off to the reception to be held in his honour, did he have a slight cough. The captain registered that his sweat-beaded forehead was a little hot, but he put it down to the excitement of being about to hear Florrie Forde for the first time.
So he left from his flat at the edge of Belsize Park, and she from Royal Hospital Road. The performance took place . . . but why waste words on it. The captain was rapt, and more . . . but why go into that? At the end of her little performance he jumped to his feet, with the virus inside him. He kissed both the prima donna’s hands, and she incautiously fell into his embrace, tear-stained and delighted that her voluntary incarceration was finally over. A week later she fell ill. Her condition worsened by the day. The last thing she remembered was singing a silly little ditty: I had a little bird, / Its name was Enza. / I opened the window, / And in-flu-enza/.
Florrie Forde was the first victim of Spanish Influenza in Britain. The Great War ended for her when her dry mouth hummed that last little song of her repertoire. Florrie Forde was buried the following week in London, along with Captain Joseph Sylers and a good many others, as the virus continued its journey east.
Although he was a doctor, it took Sergei Chestukhin a long time to realize that Petersburg had been hit by the second wave of Spanish Influenza. He can hardly be blamed — it was a time of rapture and haste, when everyone was hurrying somewhere, and the disease was hard to notice at first. The Red Guards marched to the north and the south, rushing to oppose military interventions on the distant borders of the country, in Arkhangelsk and Odessa. Ordinary people hurried about because of ration cards, remittances, errands or the lack of them, or simply because they were hungry. Everyone had some kind of money: Don roubles, Duma roubles, Kerensky roubles. Their hope-filled pockets also contained shares, title deeds for estates, and nineteenth-century tsarist promissory notes for purchased grain; all this had to remain in circulation, to be changed and rearranged following the dictate of rumours and each person’s level of nervousness.
Sergei, too, had to go out every day. He put on his woollen, doctor’s cloak and rushed to one of the formerly large Petersburg banks; he didn’t go in the front door, which was now boarded up, but round the back. There he cashed the cheques he had received instead of ration cards. From the street, the bank looked like a haunted institution where only phantasms and human abominations still stamped forms and counted money, but the door at the back opened at eight every morning. There was a strange counter area looking out onto a side alley. It looked more like a slovenly mail-sorting depot with overtired staff, all of whom had dark circles under their eyes. But this didn’t bother Sergei because he, like everyone else, was in a hurry. One day he received money, the next it was strange vouchers. The money could be cashed at the counters immediately at the bank’s exit, and the dubious-looking vouchers were accepted at an abattoir in the north of the city which reeked of mould. Both the money and the vouchers needed to be used quickly. That’s why the doctor was always in a hurry, and he told his daughter: ‘That’s the way things are today, dear Marusya — people live fast lives.’
That is how he survived from day to day; he felt he didn’t get around to thinking about Liza and had even begun to forget her. But then Spanish Influenza arrived in Petrograd too. It came on tiptoe. Slowly. From northern Silesia. It spoke German, the language of the occupiers, and a little Russian from the White Guards’ positions. At first it was in no hurry, but then it saw the bewildered people running to and fro, and it started to rush itself as if it also had to cash an uncovered promissory note. Sergei Chestukhin couldn’t explain to himself why he didn’t notice the second wave of the contagion immediately. It’s true that no one in their building on Runovsky Embankment was affected at first. The stench of decay and disease could not be smelled by the canal and in the riverside puddles in September. Only towards the end of autumn did the city administration instruct each tenant’s council to provide one person each day to work as a grave-digger at the municipal cemeteries. Did all that prevent him from noticing the disease until the end of September? Or was he rushing about so much that he had begun to forget his calling?
Only when it was his turn to be grave-digger did he snap awake. He called Margarita Nikolaevna and said he would be leaving the next day and going away for a while; he wasn’t being of much use as a father anyway. He told her he would be teaming up with other doctors; he waved dismissively when Margarita warned him it was dangerous; he didn’t reply when she asked him what she and Marusya would do alone, now that Nastia had left them, and he pretended not to hear when the good woman burst into tears. He stole out at dawn without casting a glance at Marusya, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to leave her if he saw a lock of her hair which was slowly changing from blond to coppery red.
That’s why he stole away like a thief and began to mix with the smell of carbolic acid and the taste of death. At first he wore a mask, washed his hands as a surgeon should, and was careful not to have a hangnail or any little cuts on his fingers, but then his vigilance gave way to distress. There were so many patients now that they had to be laid out in tight rows in large tents like human cargo. Each tent had two hundred beds and one duty-doctor. The surgeon and war hero Chestukhin was on duty every second night. Whom could he help of those who coughed so violently, as if they were about to cough up their insides? Whose temperature could he bring down when the stocks of Bayer’s new aspirin from Germany were already running out? He was still able to help and comfort the occasional person in those sleepless nights. Or was he just there because he wanted to ease his own burden? Yes, he was, he thought, and resolved to go all the way.
Every night he was on duty, Dr Chestukhin walked along the rows of patients and looked for the infected woman who most closely resembled his Lizochka. When he found such a patient, with copper hair, pale skin and eyes the colour of sepia, he would devote himself to her and commune with her face to face, heedless of the danger. Instead of doing the rounds of the patients, he would lie beside the moribund woman long after midnight as she spoke confusedly, in a trance, and hugged her tight, wishing for only one thing: to die together with her. He also spoke chaotically, raving as if feverish. He proposed to the dying woman, knowing no one could hear him and no one would stop him. But then his chosen one died, and the doctor passionately hoped she had passed the deadly virus on to him. But his temperature remained normal and he didn’t have any stabbi
ng pains in the chest, although every part of him was a living scream. On his next duty he was already sharing the bed with his new fiancée, the sufferer who now struck him as most closely resembling Liza with her flowing red hair. He kissed her and hugged her fragile frame, but she vanished in his arms and melted away like snow in the spring sun. Afterwards another and yet another. He stole up at night and passionately hugged the dying women — but he remained healthy nonetheless.
For Sergei Vasilyevich Chestukhin, the wartime surgeon and hero, the Great War ended when the contagion passed and he was miraculously still alive, although he had cheated on his wife with eyes the colour of sepia so many times. Two months after he had up and left, Sergei returned home to Runovsky Embankment. So shamefully alive, exactly the opposite of a tragic hero, he now continued to rush to the back premises of that once large bank to change doubtlessly valuable gold for dubious money. He told his red-haired daughter again: ‘That’s how things are, Marusya dear — life goes faster and faster’, and she looked at him with eyes the colour of sepia. But he was not the same man any more.
The Great War Page 46
