The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  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 t
he 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.

  A LONG HOT SUMMER

  Hans-Dieter Huis is singing today!

  Maestro Huis is to perform at the Deutsche Oper accompanied by Germany’s best master-singers and the orchestra conducted by the great Fritz Knappertsbusch. Huis will sing the role of Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera. All of Berlin is feverish with excitement, and every lime tree in Unter den Linden Street seems to be repeating this refrain. The tickets have long since sold out. It’s the talk of the town!

  The greatest German baritone hadn’t sung this role for more than one and a half decades. This was bec
ause he had apparently been something of a Don Juan himself in the previous century, causing one young teacher from Mainz to take poison because of him. He therefore decided not to sing the role of Don Giovanni any more during that overripe nineteenth-century, and he held that promise even longer — right up until 1914.

  Now the memory of the tender young teacher had paled, but had it entirely? For maestro Huis, the Great War began when he realized that he felt nothing inside: neither sadness, nor joy, nor any true faith in his art. He was sitting in front of the mirror and doing his make-up without anyone’s help when that realization came home to him. He put on the powdered Don Giovanni wig and looked into his already aging face, weary with the scars of many roles. He had played them on stage, played them in life, and now he had to appear before the Berliners — the most demanding audience in the world. Everyone in the auditorium was saying it would be something special, he knew it; he felt the crowd had come to see if his voice would tremble and whether he’d get stuck in the middle of his lines, unable to continue. ‘Like an old lion tamer who has to stick his head in the mouth of the beast again,’ he muttered to himself and set off for the stage through the side corridors.