“I was wondering if I could join the party. It would have been rather impolite for me not to show.”
“Didn’t you get our singed invitation?” Apis said with a dry laugh.
“Oh, that’s very good,” replied Celal.
Turning to two of his men, Apis snapped, “Watch them!”
The men trained their guns on Celal, Dragan and Céline.
The Commissioner approached Apis and said, “I thought they might cause us some trouble outside, so I brought them here. I thought that way we could keep an eye on them.”
“Well done. I’ll decide later what to do with them.”
The large wooden door of the palace squeaked, giving away a soldier who was trying to close it. After firing a single shot that hit the soldier squarely between the eyes, Apis trotted into the palace with his men. Before following Apis inside, the Commissioner turned to Celal and said, “I know this isn’t very gentlemanly of me. But Celal Bey, I just wish you’d listened to me when I warned you. Perhaps after all this is over we’ll sit down and talk.”
“Perhaps,” Celal replied. “Perhaps we will.”
13
Timelessness
DRAGAN PETROVIC did not spend that summer lost in dreams of marriage, because everything he believed in had been destroyed by a single stroke. Plunged into despair, the young lieutenant decided to purge from his very being all that remained of his previous life.
His desire to live was strong enough to prevent him from committing suicide. And since he wouldn’t commit suicide, the only option for Dragan was to not be Dragan to the greatest possible extent.
That proved to be a struggle, because not being yourself first requires knowing yourself.
He remembered that they had stood in the palace garden in a state of timeless transience, like newly planted seedlings being buffeted by a storm. Dragan also recalled how that strange man called Jovanovic, or Celal, or whatever his name was, had wrenched the rifles from the men guarding them, bending the muzzles with his bare hands and knocking the soldiers to the ground. He also remembered falling flat on his face as he ran. As he struggled to erase his past self, the taste of that mouthful of gritty mud would surface from the depths of his memories time and time again.
He recalled that they had met up with Radovan, who he thought had been at the palace. Radovan had arranged a carriage for them, which Celal drove, and later they had switched carriages. He vaguely remembered walking through a forest for almost a week, and he could also recall that they had stolen some horses and ridden to a city he didn’t recognize, before sneaking onto a train.
Eventually they arrived in Paris and made their way to a well-built two-storey house on the outskirts of the city. The first few days there were quiet. Celal hardly ever left his room and Céline was out all day, coming back only when dusk was approaching, with a basket of food.
They used the stove only to brew coffee, since none of them had much of an appetite, and they made do with salami, ham, cheese, bread and water.
That’s when Dragan decided to vanquish his past self. First, he erased Vesna’s face from his memory; he was so successful that he could no longer conjure up her image in his mind’s eye.
He wondered if she’d been killed during the coup, or if she, like Radovan, hadn’t been at the palace. As her visage disappeared from his memory, his own face started to vanish, too, whenever he looked in a mirror. Day by day Dragan became less himself.
Next he erased all thoughts of his own country, from the mountains, rivers and deepest of mole burrows to the eagles soaring in the heights—traces that he’d once felt were ingrained in his very being, and so he felt as if he were peeling a map of Serbia from his body.
As his face disappeared in the mirror, his body started disappearing as well.
All that remained was his desire to live and a yearning for love. In that sturdy two-storey building on the outskirts of Paris, Dragan yet again fell in love—this time with himself. But since he had purged himself of himself, he had difficulty identifying the object of his love. Although he was enraptured with himself, his passion was unrequited, which only stoked the fires of his obsession.
Eventually he realized that the only way he could satisfy his obsession was to indulge and spoil his love. So one morning he decided to leave the house, driven as he was by a pressing desire to enjoy the finest foods, drink the most exquisite wines and make voracious love.
By the time the young lieutenant reached the neighbourhood’s square and gazed out along the streets of Paris, he had already erased from his thoughts all traces of that two-storey house with its garden.
14
A Rather Trying Matter
KING AND QUEEN KILLED IN
BELGRADE PALACE COUP
ROYAL COUPLE BURIED IN THE SAME GRAVE
Telegram from our local correspondent
LONDON, 13TH JULY 1903
King Alexander and Queen Draga, Serbia’s ruling monarchs, have been killed. After a military unit besieged the palace and overpowered the guards, assassins blasted open the door of the royal couple’s bedroom with a bomb.
The King refused to be deposed by force and he shouted “Traitors!” at the assassins. The King was shot to death as he attempted to flee, and the Queen was killed with a bayonet.
The Chancellor, Minister of the Interior and Minister of War were killed in their homes, and the Queen’s brother and sisters are also reported to have been killed.
The revolutionaries have appointed a new chancellor and the Serbian army has proclaimed Prince Karageorgevic as the new king. The Prince, who is currently in Geneva, immediately issued a statement saying that he had no involvement in the killings. The King and Queen were buried in the same grave in the cemetery of St Mark’s Church in Belgrade.
Celal tore the story out of the newspaper, wadded it into a ball, and squeezed it in his fist until his stony fingernails cut into the flesh of his palm, drawing blood. Then he began to rake the soles of his feet against the bed’s footboard. He was running a fever, and every shudder from his body sent a new rush of nausea through his stomach, not strong enough to let him vomit to get some relief, nor so weak that he could get to his feet. He was stuck with an unbearable queasy feeling.
After wiping his bloodied palm on the pillow, he tried to sit up but fell back on his elbows. In the end he managed to reach for a cool sachet of lavender on the bedside table, which he pressed against the cut in his palm. Getting to his knees on the bed, he supported himself on the wall with one hand and pressed the sachet of lavender to his nose with the other, taking deep breaths. The fever was making his head spin. Tearing open the sachet, he watched as the lavender spilt onto the pillow. By leaning down he managed to start licking up the dried seed pods. Although they only had a faint smell, they were so bitter that they burned his mouth and throat. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to swallow some of the seeds, but a cough rising up from deep in his lungs made him double over again, and he vomited onto the pillow, against which his forehead was now pressed. This was followed by another round of vomiting, and then another. Feeling a little better, he pushed the pillow away and pulled the bed sheet aside. He pressed his face to the cool mattress, curled up and promptly fell asleep.
His head was lying between two pools of vomit, like the bust of a prince carefully placed on the bed. Flies were buzzing around the bust and the pools, and he awoke when they launched a vicious attack on his nose. He took a few moments to look around and assess his situation. Silently he got out of bed, opened the window, and pulled the bed sheets onto the floor.
He dragged the sheets downstairs and left them in front of the door to the garden. After a breath of fresh morning air, he went out to the back garden, where he collapsed beside a water pump behind a wooden screen. He filled a bucket of cool water from the pump and poured it over his head. He then removed his clothes and washed them, shivering in the cool morning air.
With a towel wrapped around his waist, he went into the kitchen to make hi
mself a cup of coffee and roll a cigarette with some tobacco he found on a shelf. Céline walked in and said, “Admit it, you enjoy going around half-naked.”
“Madame, I haven’t been around much at all.”
“Feeling groggy?”
“So groggy that I just want to go back to sleep.”
“Looks like you need a shave, too.”
“Well, I thought I should cover up my chin at least—it wouldn’t do to be too half-naked.”
Céline took a few sips of Celal’s coffee and started pacing back and forth, holding the cup between her hands.
“Celal, go and get dressed. Our guest is going to be here soon.”
She emptied the cup into the sink.
“By the way, you make a horrible cup of coffee.”
Celal lit his cigarette.
“If you want me to look presentable, our guest must be a trying person. Primo, this is your house, so whoever’s coming is your guest. Secundo, I myself am a guest of sorts here. Guests visiting guests… That’s not the usual way of doing things. Tertio, that’s how I like my coffee.”
“Fine, go on and drink your tar, then. The word ‘guest’ is just a figure of speech. Jean has finally made it to Paris. He’s staying at the Le Meurice on the rue de Rivoli. Did you know that it was the first hotel in Paris to have a telephone? It looks out over the Tuileries Garden. I love that place. We should go for a visit sometime. Anyway, he called while you were washing in the garden. He’ll be here soon. I think.”
“What do you mean, ‘I think’?”
“The telephone is a great invention, but we could barely understand each other because of all the crackling. That’s as much as I understood.”
“Fine.”
“Celal, melancholy doesn’t suit you.”
“Why not?”
“Just think of Aristotle.”
Celal said nothing.
With a chuckle, Céline went on: “Aristotle believed that all geniuses—philosophers, scholars, poets and artists—suffer from melancholy. They’re born with black bile. Take the case of Homer. If you’ll recall the Iliad: ‘But once he was stamped with the hatred of all the gods, he fled the sound of the footsteps of mankind, wandering alone with naught but his heavy heart.’”
“Meaning?”
“Accept it, Celal, you’re not quite a genius. If you want to be able to suffer the pangs of melancholy, you have to be a genius. You’re no hero from the Iliad, and the gods won’t go out of their way to despise you. If someone’s unworthy of melancholy, it just makes them dull and uninteresting.”
“Céline, they killed everyone and we couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe we even helped them in that massacre. What do you expect? Of course, let’s forget about it. We’ll just forget that they mutilated the King and Queen’s corpses and threw them into a pile of manure in the garden. And Jean shouldn’t go to the trouble of coming all the way here. Let’s go to his fancy hotel with a telephone and have a feast. I promise not to be dull and uninteresting. And of course, we have to make sure that Madame is always in the highest of spirits.”
“You don’t say. What a wonderful idea. I wonder what truths are lurking in the ironic shallows of people suffering from melancholy. Very well then, I’ll call Jean now. But my dear Celal Bey, please conduct yourself in a civilized manner. We’re leaving in half an hour.”
Celal offered a wan smile.
Céline said, “Look, Celal. No one ever became truly unhappy just because they couldn’t understand the inner workings of another person’s soul. But unhappiness is the only fate for those who are deaf to themselves.”
They stopped in front of room 304 on the third floor of the Le Meurice. Céline rang the doorbell. Wearing his blond wig and fake moustache, Jean opened the door with an impish smile on his lips. After giving both of them a long hug, he bowed and invited them in.
They passed into the suite’s sitting room. On the table was a tray of nearly two dozen oysters on ice. Jean picked up one of the oysters, sprinkled it with mignonette sauce and a squeeze of lemon, and sucked it down in two slurps. After popping a buttered piece of bread into his mouth and pouring champagne for everyone, he said, “We were nearly all killed because of that poor Swede.”
Celal reached for an oyster. “Which Swede?”
“The whirling dervish who exploded. He’s actually Swedish. He wasn’t a bad painter, either. He found himself penniless in Paris. That’s when I met him. I wouldn’t be surprised if Paris was founded for the sole purpose of having artists go bankrupt. He was an anarchist at the time. Then again I was, too, before I started working for Sahir. I was a follower of Prince Kropotkin’s. I was even tried in the Trial of the Thirty. Then I got tired of it all. When they started setting off bombs left and right, I decided to get out. That Swede was also put on trial, but unlike me he went to prison. When they let him out, he became interested in Islam and became a dervish. He even stayed in Cairo for a while. If you ask me, he was neither a dervish nor an anarchist, just a megalomaniac who couldn’t squeeze his art onto a canvas, so in his own way he tried to turn his life into a work of art.”
“Was the fire a coincidence?”
“It’s hard to say these days how much of anything is a coincidence. I really don’t know, Celal. I breathed in so much smoke that I ended up in hospital for two weeks. Apis could have finished off my work right there. No one knew anything about our plan to turn on the peace machine. It was probably destroyed in the fire, when the stage caved in. But one thing is certain. Apis took advantage of the fire and went ahead with his coup.”
“And the Commissioner?”
“He works for an arms dealer. His work was done when a new king who would buy his guns came to power.”
“So did the Swede decide to commit suicide?”
“It would appear that way. Apparently he met a Swiss dervish in Cairo, and they started publishing a magazine. Turns out the Swiss dervish was also an anarchist, who was in touch with certain Serbs involved in the movement. In those days, everyone in Switzerland was either a banker or an anarchist. But we all know that our Swede was also an explosives expert. Perhaps he decided to blow himself up on stage as a way to deliver a message to all the sovereigns of the world, as his artistic grand finale.”
Celal squeezed some lemon juice onto his second oyster.
“Who’s ever heard of a dervish committing suicide and taking hundreds of other people to the other world with him in the process?”
“My dear Celal, the entire world was probably founded upon a big misunderstanding. I’m quite certain that the order of dervishes would never ask anyone to blow himself up. But they found something in the Swede’s room. I wrote it down somewhere. Just a moment, let me find it.”
Jean went into the bedroom and came back with a piece of paper.
“Ah yes, here it is. It’s probably a quote from Rumi: ‘Someone who has learnt to ignite and illuminate the light in his heart cannot be burnt even by the sun. If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence.’ Celal, I think that once a person decides to do something, they can find signs everywhere that point the way to what they want to do.”
Céline cut in: “So the peace machine might still work, right?” She bit into a piece of buttered bread on which she’d placed some small pickles.
“There’s no evidence that proves that it doesn’t work. I still have my uncle Pierre’s drawings and formulas. I can get everything needed to build it, in no time at all. Of course, what happened in Belgrade was terrible and we can’t change that, but we can change what happens next. Céline, wasn’t that young lieutenant with you all as well? You said he was close to the machine while it was still running. Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. He came with us to Paris, but one morning he left and we haven’t seen him since.”
“It bodes ill,” Celal said. “In difficult times, Lieutenant Dragan has an odd knack for getting himself into trouble.”
With a smile, Jean said, “I think t
hat all of us here share that knack.”
Céline ate three oysters, one after the other, with no mignonette sauce or lemon juice.
“When can we activate the machine?”
“Well, mademoiselle, I may not have graduated but I was a student at the École Polytechnique. In no time at all.”
*
Celal troubled himself little with the machine’s technical details, as he realized that he would never grasp how it actually functioned.
He was confident, however, that Pierre’s plans would work. A version of the peace machine had run, if only for a moment, in Belgrade. However, even if that amateur Swedish dervish hadn’t committed suicide—just to burn up the night of his self-existence and to shine like the sun—and thrown the circus into bloody chaos, the effects of the machine would have been limited to a mere few kilometres. Belgrade simply didn’t have the electrical power to allow the effects of the machine to spread very far.
All great writers may agree that, while there are ways to oppose military invasions, there is no force in the world which can resist the power of ideas. Therefore, it is impossible to create an object that is more powerful than an idea born at the right time.
And the time for the peace machine had come at last. The Paris Métro had opened only three years earlier, and the world’s largest hydroelectric plant had been built just outside the city to power it. Pierre had calculated that in order to have the desired effect the machine would need to be powered by a massive amount of electricity, produced by rows upon rows of rumbling turbines. In Pierre’s time no such plant had existed, but now the power that drove Paris’s underground carriages was simply waiting to be hooked up to the peace machine.
The Peace Machine Page 14