Читать книгу The Great War - Aleksandar Gatalica - Страница 8

PROLOGUE: TWO REVOLVER SHOTS

The Great War began for Dr Mehmed Graho when he was least expecting it, just when he was told that ‘two important bodies’ would be brought to the mortuary in that June heatwave. But for Dr Graho, hunched and ageing but still hale, with a bald head and prominent flat pate, no bodies were more important than others. All the corpses which came under his knife were waxy pale, with cadaverously gaping mouths, often with eyes which no one had had time to close, or had not dared to, which now bulged and stared away into space, striving with their lifeless pupils to catch one last ray of sun.

But that did not disturb him. Ever since 1874, he had placed his round glasses on his nose, donned his white coat, put on long gloves and begun his work at the Sarajevo mortuary, where he removed hearts from within chests, felt broken ribs for signs of police torture and searched the stomachs of the deceased for swallowed fish bones and the remains of the last meal.

Now the ‘important bodies’ arrived, and the pathologist still hadn’t heard what had happened out in the streets. He didn’t know that the Archduke’s car had been backing out of Franz Joseph Street and that there, from out of the crowd on the corner near the Croatia Insurance building, a little fellow had fired two revolver shots at the heir to the Austrian throne and the Duchess of Hohenberg. At first, the bodyguards thought the royal couple was unharmed and it looked as if the Archduke had only turned and glanced away in the other direction, to the assembled crowd; the Duchess resembled a doll in a Vienna shop window, and a moment later blood gushed from her noble breast; Franz Ferdinand’s mouth also filled with blood, which trickled down the right-hand side of his orderly, black-dyed moustache. Only a little later was it established that the important persons had been hit, and within fifteen minutes the male of the couple had become an ‘important body’. Half an hour after that, the important female person hadn’t awoken from her state of unconsciousness, lying in the umbrage of the Governor’s residence, and she too was declared an ‘important body’.

Now the two important bodies had arrived, and no one had told Dr Graho who they were. But one glance at the male corpse’s uniform with its breast full of medals and one look at the long, trailing, silk dress of the female body told him who had come under his scalpel. When he had undressed them and washed their wounds he was told not to extract the bullets from their bodies but just to mix a plaster slurry and make casts of their faces. That is probably why he didn’t notice that the Archduke had a small malignant tumour in the oral cavity and that something had been killed together with the lady which could have been a foetus in her womb.

Just put the plaster on their faces and take their masks. And that he did, while shouts out the front of the mortuary mingled with the warm summer wind from the River Milyacka and the distant sound of sobbing. Just a little further away, in the street, a crowd set off to lynch the assassins. Discarded weapons were found beneath the Latin Bridge. In the panic, informants spread various rumours, mixed with copious perversion and lies, while Dr Graho stirred the plaster dust and water in his metal basin to make sure the mixture wouldn’t start to set before he applied it to the faces.

First of all, he covered the noblewoman’s rounded forehead with the crease in the middle, then her slightly stubby nose with flaring nostrils. He filled the nasal cavity well, spread plaster between the eyelashes and carefully, like an artist, shaped the eyebrows, applying the paste almost lovingly to every hair. This was fitting preparation for the Archduke’s countenance and his black, handlebar moustache, which had to be faithfully preserved for posterity and the many bronze castings which — so he imagined — would grace every institution of the Dual Monarchy for decades to come. Was he afraid? Did his nerves show? Did he perhaps feel a little like a demiurge, crafting the post­humous image of what until just half an hour ago was Austria-Hungary’s most powerful to-be? Not at all. Dr Graho was one of those people with no loose thoughts buzzing around in their head. He didn’t daydream, nor was he plagued by nightmares. The souls of the dead from his day’s work didn’t haunt him when he closed his eyes at night. If it were otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to become Sarajevo’s main pathologist in 1874 and receive deceased Turks and the dead of all three faiths day in, day out.

Nor did his hand tremble now. He modelled the plaster beneath the heir apparent’s lower lip, painstakingly shaped the dimple in his clean-shaven chin, covered his eyelids and attentively devoted himself to the moustache. First of all, he removed the tallow which gave it body and then did his very best to ensure that every black moustache hair was given its coat of plaster. When he had finished, two limp, completely naked bodies with white face-masks lay side by side beneath his hands. Now he had only to wait; but then something strange happened.

First one word, then another.

Had someone perhaps come into the mortuary? One of his assist­ants, or a policeman? He turned around, but there was no one nearby, and the words were coalescing into a whisper. What language was it? At first, he thought it seemed a mixture of many languages: Turkish, Serbian, German and Hungarian, all of which he knew, but they were intermingled with others — Asian, he thought, African, and extinct ones like Aramaic or Hazaragi. But no, he must be fooling himself. This doctor, who never dreamed, sat down quietly on the chair; still unmoved by fright. He looked at the bodies to ensure they weren’t moving; yet even if by some chance they did, it wouldn’t have surprised him either. When the anima leaves, the body can go wild and twitch in a frenzy. He had seen this back in 1899, when one poor wretch kicked and shuddered almost a whole day after death, as if he had electricity running through him, and very nearly fell from the dissection table. Or take the woman, perhaps in 1904 or — that was it — 1905, who seemed to breathe all evening. Her beautiful, youthful breasts, which no child had suckled, rose and fell evenly before the eyes of Dr Graho, as if her dead mouth still drew breath; but it was all a trick of the eye and the doctor later documented the case in a well-received article for a Vienna medical journal.

The Archduke and Duchess could even have embraced and it wouldn’t have surprised him. But they were speaking . . . the words wrested themselves from regional idioms and made their way to him articulately and clearly all in German. He tried to tell where the whisper was coming from and quickly established that it was the mouths beneath the plaster masks which were articulating them. Now he was alarmed. This was far from physiologically predictable and would hardly go towards a convincing lecture before the Imperial Society of Pathologists. Franz Ferdinand and his Duchess were speaking to each other. Dr Graho leaned his ear right up to Franz Ferdinand’s mouth, and from beneath the plaster mask he heard one muffled but still discernible word:

‘Darling?’

‘Yes, my dear?’ immediately came the reply from the Duchess.

‘Do you see these lands, this forest, whose leaves grow and fall as fast as if the years flew by like minutes?’

In reply, there followed only the Duchess’s: ‘Are you in pain?’

‘A little,’ the important male body answered. ‘And you?’

‘No, darling, but there’s something firm over my mouth, and it’s not the clay of the grave.’

Mehmed Graho recoiled. The plaster casts hadn’t yet set on the faces of the royal couple, but at hearing the Duchess’s words he set about removing them with trembling hands. He was fortunate that the plaster didn’t break because that would certainly have cost him the position he had quietly held ever since Ottoman times. With the two, mercifully intact death-masks in his hands, he looked at the splotchy faces of the wax-pale figures on his table. The lips were moving, he could swear to it now.

‘I’m naked,’ said the male body.

‘I’m ashamed. You know I’ve never ever been nude before you,‘ the woman replied.

‘But now we’re going.’

‘Where?’

‘Away.’

‘What will we leave behind?’

‘Grief, a void, our dreams and all our pitiable plans.’

‘What will happen?’

‘There will be war, the great war we’ve been preparing for.’

‘But without us?’

‘Actually, because of us . . . ’

At that moment, a man dashed into the mortuary. He addressed Dr Graho in Turkish:

‘Doctor, have you finished? Just in time! The new uniforms are here.’ He continued in German: ‘My God, how terrible it is to see them naked, and their faces messy with plaster. Wash them quickly now. The court delegation will be arriving any minute. The bodies need to be embalmed and taken by express train to Metkovich harbour, from there to be shipped to Trieste. Come on, doctor, snap out of it! It’s not as if they’re the first dead bodies you’ve seen. Once they’ve stopped breathing, the Archduke and Duchess are just bodies like any others.’

But the voices, and the war, the great war . . . Dr Graho was about to ask . . . but he didn’t say a word. Dead mouths don’t speak after all, he thought, as he handed the plaster casts to the stranger, without knowing if he was a policeman, secret agent, soldier, provocateur, or even one of the assassins. Afterwards everything went the usual mortuary way. The bodies were dressed, a new coat was quickly put on over the Archduke’s breast, new, imitation medals were attached in place of the old, bloodied and bent ones, a new gown almost identical to the silk one in pale apricot was slipped on over the Countess’s chest (no one thought of underwear now), and an evening came on just like any other, with that gentle breeze in the valley which cools Sarajevo even in summer.

Dr Graho was on duty in the days that followed. None of the bodies on his table moved and none of them said a word, but 850 km to the north-west the entire Austrian press was firing verbal salvos at the Serbian government and Prime Minister Nikola Pashich, whom German-­speaking journalists had always despised. The reporter, Tibor Veres, worked for the Budapest daily Pester Lloyd, whose editorial office was housed in a dark, altogether diabolical building on the Pest side of the city, right by the Danube. Veres was an ethnic Hungarian from the border province of Bachka, and since he had a knowledge of Serbian he was entrusted with monitoring the Serbian newspapers. The Great War began for Veres when he read in one of papers: “Vienna, where diligent Serbian businessmen have invested for years, is becoming a bandits’ den, and the slander of Austro-Jewish journalists more and more resembles the baying of dogs.” Veres flew into a rage. He later admitted to a few colleagues that he was offended not so much as a Hungarian Jew (which he pretended to be) but as a journalist (an exaggeration, because he was an ordinary hack). And over a mug of black beer at the local tavern he snarled: ‘I’ll get them for this!’, and the drunken company took up his words in a boisterous chorus: ‘Hurrah, he’ll get them for this!’

As a cheap scribbler in the big city, who just yesterday was writing about fires in the buildings of Buda and the chamber pots which some city folk still emptied out of the windows on the heads of passers-by, what could he now do but believe that the exhortation of the jingoistic crowd in the pub put him under some kind of obligation. But to do what? a few days later, the editor gave him a new assignment which struck him as journalistic providence: all the junior staff of the Pester Lloyd who didn’t have columns of their own — which included young Veres — were given the daily task of writing and sending threatening letters to the Serbian court.

A seemingly futile job; yet not for he who until recently had been reporting on the measles epidemic in the gypsy ghetto on Margaret Island. The new task demanded loyalty and patriotism, but above all a style of writing adaptable to lampooning. And Veres put his mind to it. He was loyal, and resolute in the extreme. He himself came to believe he was a Hungarian of Israelite faith, with a heightened sense of patriotism. And his style — he had no doubt he’d make the grade. The first letter addressed to H.R.H. Alexander, heir to the Serbian throne, turned out beautifully. Tibor had the impression not of writing it, but of shouting directly at that impertinent prince who had kindled a fire beneath old, civilized Europe. Two sentences in particular were to stick fondly in his memory: ‘Stupid swine, you can’t even wallow in your own pen,’ and ‘Son of a polecat, you’ve fouled your own den with your vile stench’.

When the Serbian press, which he continued to monitor, reported that hundreds of absurd, abusive letters from Pest and Vienna were arriving at the court in Hungarian and German every day, full of the vilest insults to Crown prince Alexander and old King Peter, Veres took that as encouragement to carry on even more resolutely (the editor himself even read one lampoon and told him something like ‘you’ll make a good capital-city journalist’). But then something strange happened to him, like it did to the pathologist Dr Graho, albeit nothing with quite such Gothic portent as at the Sarajevo mortuary. Tibor simply started to lose control of his words. He couldn’t say how it came about.

He began every new letter with an extremely insulting form of address. He’d think up a very impudent characterization of the Serbian king and Serbia as a nation, then develop the idea like a good journalist does, finding shameful examples in history, and in the end embellish it all with thinly veiled threats. When Tibor wanted to show one such letter to the editor and fortunately decided to reread it first, he was greatly surprised. The words he had written seemed to have played games on him, right there on the paper. It was a real free-for-all, a grammatical kingdom without a king. Nouns stole each other’s meanings, nor did verbs stay aloof; adjectives and adverbs were right little bandits and contrabandists, like real-life pirates who smuggle booty and slaves. Only numbers and prepositions were partly immune to this supercilious game, the result of which was that everything he wrote ultimately resembled praise of the Serbian Crown prince, rather than an insult to him.

At first, he tried to rewrite the letter, but then he realized it was quite stupid to try and rephrase a panegyric of Serbia when he had actually wanted to write the complete opposite. He decided to change language and switched from Hungarian to German. He dredged up heavy German words from his memory; vocabulary with lumps and bumps and excrescences — words blind and deaf to morality and any vestige of self-consciousness. From this syntactic rubble, picked up off the streets and slapped together with petulant jargon, our little Budapest chronicler would again compose a letter, and once more it seemed quite beautiful, if that can be said of lampoons; but as soon as he had finished, it began to change its meaning before his very eyes and impudently polish itself up. Gering (trivial) simply switched to gerecht (rightful), and when he wanted to write ‘Das war ein dummes Ding’ (that was stupid) it turned out his hand had written ‘Jedes Ding hat zwei Seiten’ (everything has two sides) as if he wanted to enter a debate with the impertinent prince rather than defame him. And so it continued. Words which had smacked of devilry and human excretions now seemed to have bathed and doused themselves with perfume. A profanity became an ordinary little reproach, and a reproach morphed into words of acclaim.

He thought this might be because he was writing on thin, journalists’ onion-skin paper, so he asked the editor for some thicker stuff. He also changed his fountain pen and swapped blue for black ink, before he was finally relieved of his torment. His hate mail now remained as he intended: a devastating storm with hailstones the size of eggs. The editor liked his letters too, and Tibor thought the secret lay in the paper, pen and black ink. He even felt like kissing his mischievous pen, with which he had gone on to write a whole host of shameless letters to the Serbian court during the summer of 1914. But he didn’t know what was happening in the mail.

The sordid letters now realized that they shouldn’t change before the eyes of their bloated, sleep-deprived creator; instead, they resolved to change their meaning in the postbox or the luggage van of the Austro-Hungarian mail service, which carried letters all over Europe, including to Serbia. One journalist thus saved his job shortly before mobilization began, and the Serbian court was surprised that among the hundreds of lampoons from Pest there was also the occasional eulogy, and they mistakenly took this as a sign that some common sense still existed in Austria-Hungary.

The Serbian press continued to make a brouhaha and to bandy around insulting language itself, except that the words didn’t change in any of the papers in Serbia, and no such glitch ever went to press to skew the meaning of a sentence. Tibor continued to write with his black ink on the new, thicker paper and to monitor the Serbian newspapers. But he only browsed through the first few pages. The advertisements and announcements were of no interest to him, and yet it was precisely these which led to ‘an incident’ in Belgrade, as Politika called it. It all began with a little advertisement which Tibor didn’t read. For Djoka Velkovich, a small dealer in shoe polish, the Great War began when he placed a framed advertisement in Politika: “Buy German Idealin shoe polish! Real Idealin, with the shoe on the tin, is made of pure tallow and preserves the leather of your shoes.” At the foot of the ad, so as to fill up all the space he had paid for, he added a phrase which would later prove fatal for him: “Beware of imitations for the sake of your footwear.”

The ad was printed on the fourth page of Politika on the day the front pages wrote “Austria sticks to its blinkered position”, “The Times varies with Austrian and Pest press” and “Scoop: the assassins Princip and Cha­bri­novich were Austro-Hungarian citizens”, but the small dealer in imported shoe polish didn’t read the headlines. Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich, a shoemaker, didn’t see the front pages either, but he did note the ad and the phrase “Beware of imitations for the sake of your footwear”. It seems Gavra had a bone to pick with Djoka. Once they had both been cobbler’s assistants, and people say they even shared a courtyard house belonging to Miya Chikanovich, a nineteenth-century wholesale and retail dealer. Whether shoemaker Crno­gor­che­vich decided to sabotage Velkovich’s shoe-polish business out of envy, or due to some old, unsettled accounts, is not known.

They say that Crno­gor­che­vich boasted to his boozy mates in the café Moruna that he hated everything German, especially when it was to do with his trade, and that he didn’t see why Serbia should import shoe polish and call it Idealin when Serbs could mix tallow and black dye themselves and make a better polish than anything ‘the Krauts’ could come up with. It was probably this grandstanding in the café — with a refrain very similar to the one which inspired a little journalist in Pest and which the crowd repeated like a salvo: ‘Everything of ours is better than the Krauts’!’ — which prompted the shoemaker to begin producing an imitation of Idealin himself. All he needed was domestic tallow, locally produced dye, a tradesman from Vrchin to make the tins, a shady workman to cast the die for an embossing machine like the one which impressed the design of the hand holding a shoe and the German slogan, ‘ist die beste Idealin’ — and the fake shoe polish came onto the market.

Both versions sold in the grocery stores, so Velkovich and Crno­gor­che­vich’s paths didn’t cross at first. But Belgrade was too small a town for this ‘Idealin coexistence’ to last for long. Velkovich noticed the counterfeit and it only took him a few days of asking around among shoemakers, coffee-house ruffians and snotty-nosed apprentices to find out who his rival was. He saw red when he heard it was Crno­gor­che­vich, with whom he had shared a room as a young man and paid for the experience with an empty belly because everything he earned went towards the rent.

He placed one more ad in Politika, warning “Mr Crno­gor­che­vich and those who assist him” to withdraw their fake product from the market or else “suffer all manner of sanctions: legal, commercial and personal”, but the shoe-polish imposter wasn’t to be deterred. Moreover, as a seasoned swindler, he immediately pointed the finger at Velkovich and claimed he was the one selling the bogus Idealin and that they should have court-appointed experts examine both products to prove which was genuine. But they were in the midst of the hot summer that followed the Balkan Wars in the south, and it was also the turbulent week when the diplomatic note of the Austrian government was to be delivered by Count Giesl, the Austrian Minister at Belgrade, so initially no one paid much heed to that little dispute.

The sworn rivals considered their next steps, and the first thing they each came up with was to find some heavies to beat up the other and wreck his ‘shameful manufactory’, but it turned out that hooligans were in short supply. They therefore decided to resolve the matter with a duel! Velkovich and Crno­gor­che­vich agreed to this on the same day as a peculiar aeroplane was seen in the sky above the city; it circled for ten minutes before disappearing back over the Danube into Austria-Hungary in the direction of Visnjica. As there was no tradition of duelling in Belgrade, the two shoemakers scarcely knew all the prepara­tions needed for a proper duel, so they largely went by the kitschy French novels which both of them read, relying on their hazy memory of duels described with the sentiment usual to that kind of pulp.

They scoured the city for pistols and eventually both of them found a Browning (Crno­gor­che­vich a long-barrelled model, Velkovich a short one). Then they set off in search of seconds, and white shirts with lace on their chests and tight breeches à la Count of Monte Cristo, as if they were preparing to get married, not to face death. At roughly this stage, the sensation-hungry press took an interest in the matter and unshaven Belgrade busybodies turned their attention to it. Partly, at least, it was intended to distract readers from the concern so amply incited by the front pages. The shoemakers were declared to be gentlemen, great masters of their trade and rivals in a contest for an elusive woman’s hand, but hardly anyone mentioned that the duel had actually been set over shoe polish.

The press coverage was sufficient for the Belgrade police to also take an interest. It was established that neither Velkovich nor Crno­gor­che­vich had done military service because they had been sent to the rear during the Serbian-Bulgarian War of 1885, so probably neither of them had ever fired a bullet. But the Brownings were itching to be used, and a site had to be found, “just like the fateful battle of the Ottomans and the Serbs found its Kosovo”, as one journalist put it. At first, the shoemakers wanted their ‘field of honour’ to be in Topchider Park, but the Belgrade City Council ordered that there was to be no shooting and killing in that waterlogged wood as it would endanger the peace; the king’s nearby summer residence would be steeped in sorrow if he heard of the incident.

The fierce rivals’ seconds therefore proposed the nearby hippodrome. It was decided that the duel be held on race day, on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, in the week of 29 June according to the old Julian calendar, immediately after the five scheduled races had been run. And so a sizeable crowd gathered, this time less because of the horses than because of humans with the brain of a horse, if that is no insult to gentle ears.

The starting guns were the first to fire: the first consolation race was won by the stallion Gevgelia, while White Rose triumphed in the second consolation race, Greymane crossed the line first in the derby, the jockeys’ race was won by the mare Countess and the officers’ race, to the bookmakers’ surprise, by the yearling Kireta from the same stable. It was getting on for seven in the evening by the time Djoka Velkovich and Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich strode out into the middle of the grassy, sports field, which the race track wound around. At first, everything resembled those heart-rending nineteenth-century novels. The crowd was cheerful and amused. Death, it seemed, would also be vaudevillian. But the doctors at the side had alcohol and balls of cotton ready on their stools, nonetheless. The seconds dressed the death-daring rivals in their white shirts. Both of them really had insisted on lace. The pistols were loaded with just one round and cocked. The duellers walked back to a distance of one hundred metres and then raised their arms.

At that moment, everything ceased to look like a novel. This was probably because the bloodthirsty crowd roared ever more loudly, and the hand of each shoemaker trembled. Velkovich was unable to even hold up his outstretched left arm, while Crno­gor­che­vich’s gun in his right hand jammed and the bullet didn’t want to exit the barrel. Now it was Velkovich’s turn to fire using his short Browning, and send his adversary to meet his maker if his bullet found its mark. But he hesitated, while the clamour of those who knew they were part of a crowd and wouldn’t be to blame for anything afterwards grew and grew. When his fear-blanched forefinger finally pulled the trigger, the cartridge exploded in his hand, bursting the barrel of his pistol and badly scorching the right side of his face. Velkovich collapsed and the doctors came running. In the confusion, the seconds declared Crno­gor­che­vich the victor of the last duel in Belgrade before the Great War.

Fake Idealin and its proprietor thus won the day, and a whole month before the war began it was sold in Belgrade as the real McCoy; but shoes in Belgrade, like those in Bosnia, still dried out and warped in the oppressive heat. This made Dr Mehmed Graho resolve to buy a new pair. He dropped in at an old cobbler’s in the market place. Once he had bought shoes in Serbian-owned shops, but they were now closed. Their smashed windows were boarded up, and Dr Graho complained that Sarajevo was increasingly becoming a battlefield and a dump — since no one collected the rubbish left behind after demonstrations. He entered the cobbler’s shop with that in mind, pointed to a pair of ordinary brown shoes and tried them on. Without an inkling that anything important would happen to him, he focused his attention on buying a pair of new shoes for himself. He was flat-footed and constantly had swollen joints, so not every pair suited him. In fact, he had great difficulty finding the right footwear, and this time, too, he gave up the idea of buying the handsome, perforated brown shoes.

He returned home and set about shaving. First he lathered under his nose, then on his cheeks and finally under his chin. He looked at his face in the mirror, and not as much as a glimmer of the day’s events at the mortuary passed through his mind. He made the first stroke with the razor slowly and carefully so as not to cut himself. He’d be on duty in the evening and knew he mustn’t look slovenly. He arrived at the mortuary shortly after seven. Several bodies came in that night which didn’t interest him. He examined them, carried out two simple autopsies and then sat on the metal chair for a long time, waiting for new work. Nothing happened until morning, and he managed to doze a little.