The reclusive landowner Butovich loved his wife and wouldn’t let her go quite so easily. Instead, he clenched his teeth and sent her away to his estate in Silka, near Poltava, placing her beneath the watchful eye of a servant. This infuriated the red-headed governor-general, who immediately decided on a ‘frontal attack’ to liberate Silka, until he was handed a confidential note which smacked of transgression. This upset him so much that he immediately received the Austrian consul Franz Altschuler, who introduced himself as an old friend of Yekaterina’s and presented him with a plan. Not every nuisance of a landowner required that one had to ‘call in the cavalry’, he said. (The governor-general was a cavalry commander and author of several textbooks on the role of cavalry in modern warfare.) A wife could file for divorce, providing there was proof of her husband’s infidelity, and it so happened that a French governess, a certain Mademoiselle Gaston, was employed in the Butovichs’ household. One simply needed to spread a rumour in Kiev that Mademoiselle Gaston was the landowner’s lover, and then the divorce would be a matter of course. And who would spread the rumours? None better than the foreign citizen Altschuler.
The dastardly act was promptly done. All of Kiev turned its opera glasses towards the second gallery — in malicious glee, of course — and looked there for Yekaterina ‘Sukhomlinova’, as they were already calling her, but the box was empty. When Mademoiselle Gaston heard she was involved in a scandal, she hurriedly packed one little case and fled to Paris. Sukhomlinov and Altschuler sent a shady and very dangerous man on her trail, a certain Dmitri Bogrov, who was not only adept with weapons but also an expert on the Parisian dregs of fallen souls who end up at the Mont de Piété pawnshop. Bogrov’s mission was to find Mademoiselle Gaston and offer her a tidy sum, but she surprised everyone by rejecting the money and requesting an official medical examination, which established that she was a virgin.
When Sukhomlinov heard this he didn’t know what to do. ‘What? a thirty-year-old French woman — a virgin? That’s impossible!’ he declared. The scandal had already mounted an invisible steed and swiftly ridden to the capital, and the tsar had been informed of everything. What could the cavalry general do other than appeal to the monarch, who for some reason seemed to quite like him? The circumstances, too, required the tsar’s judgement. Since the rumours concerned such an important military figure, French diplomacy immediately sided with Mademoiselle Gaston, so there was no choice but for Tsar Nicholas II to quickly cut the Gordian knot. ‘Ms Gaston is perhaps a virgin in France, but not in Russia,’ he said in his own unmistakable style. That was the signal for the obsequious landowner Butovich to sign Yekaterina Viktorovna’s divorce papers right away.
Now she could triumphantly return to her box in the second gallery at the Solovtsov Theatre, and was thereafter always accompanied by her second husband. She never took off her black chapeau, and he always wore his fur hat so no one would see the sizeable bald patch atop his knobbly yet seemingly distended skull. It was the anything but tranquil year of 1905, but for them it was one of the loveliest. They moved to the capital and began building a house in the charming neighbourhood near the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, but Mrs Sukhomlinova soon revealed her true, imperious nature as the wife of a general. Not only did the subordinate officers and orderlies now have two superiors, not only did her circle of friends immediately join the general’s clique of confidants, and not only did the Austrian consul Franz Altschuler become the dearest dinner guest, but ox-eyed Yekaterina also decided on alterations to the plans for the new house. So it was that madam’s boudoir was connected by a door to the general’s study where he, as commander-in-chief of the Russian cavalry, received confidential visits; at the same time, a door in the opposite wall of the boudoir connected it to the parlour.
The dastardly act was complete. With much celebration, song and dance, and a jaunt in a beautifully adorned troika-sleigh across the frozen Neva, the Sukhomlinovs moved into their new house in February 1906, and the years of luxury began. Both of them fondly remembered 1909; they visited Capri for the first time in 1911 and also saw Pompeii; in 1912, she received the tsar’s permission to attend manoeuvres of Russia’s land forces and they almost went so far as to make her a general’s uniform of her own, adorned with same row of medals as her husband wore. But people age, even if they do live in the lap of luxury. She developed an ever more massive chest over the years, and he had ever more red hair, albeit only around the ears. Hera softened her nipples with Parisian creams so they wouldn’t be so visible; he took on an unkempt look, and before he knew it he had two red horns like a real Zeus. The dearest household friend remained the Austrian Altschuler. The general seemed to love him more than the others, ever since the days when they were involved in that little plot, although he also lauded and extolled the others who had helped him on that occasion.
Altschuler was the most influential of all the envoys of foreign embassies in Petrograd and Tsarskoye Selo. He came to see the Sukhomlinovs on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays one week, and Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays the next. He became so much at home there that the general felt he could hear his voice even on days he hadn’t said he was coming. That happened for the first time when they had just moved into the house. He had received an important military deputation in his study, and Yekaterina was in her boudoir, when he had the distinct impression that he heard Altschuler behind his back somewhere between two of his replies. But what could he do? He became a little nervous, but Hera found a way of stopping Zeus’ ears better than Ulysses did for his sailors. She bared her breasts for him, and other voluptuous tracts, put two pillows under her belly, lay on her stomach and let him have fun with her bare bottom. After that, Sukhomlinov kept hearing Altschuler’s voice, but he no longer paid any attention to it, and if he did, it was only so as to occasionally see the buttocks of Yekaterina Viktorovna. The envoy therefore continued to visit them unhindered and every time brought presents from Vienna. Whenever the general said: ‘How can I ever thank you?’ Altschuler replied: ‘The debt of gratitude is entirely mine.’
It all went smoothly and completely unimpeded: Altschuler would enter the boudoir through the one door, eavesdrop on what Sukhomlinov was saying through the other, and leave quietly through the first door again, planting a passionate kiss on Yekaterina’s pouted lips on the way. Everything went swimmingly until that ‘most influential envoy’ vanished on the last day of July 1914. Before long, Germany and Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia. Sukhomlinov, the minister of war, cursed Altschuler as a ‘Viennese bastard’. At last he would no longer have to hear the tinny drone of his voice, nor accept his tawdry presents, which had never meant much to him anyway. His wife was of a different mind, however, and she no longer even thought of baring her chest and her plump behind for her red-haired goat. Now she herself listened through the boudoir door, slightly ajar, to what her husband said, and then attempted to deliver the information to the Austrians.
Yet the plan was absurd, because she had kept the door ajar all those years out of tenderness, not in order to spy herself, and now, in the middle of the Great War, she didn’t know what to listen for, what to sift out and who to report it to. 1915 came, and by now Yekaterina had accumulated a confused mass of information through the door of the boudoir. It didn’t occur to her that much of it became ‘stale’ within just a few days, forgetting her time as an assistant in a solicitor’s office. So she was left with the dilemma of what to do with her ‘archive’. Who could she give it to? The embassies of the warring countries were closed, and proper spies naturally avoided working with the ox-eyed general’s wife, which further dented her self-esteem.
After defeat in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes was narrowly avoided, hard times came for the minister of war. ‘Iron Duke’ Nicholas Nikolaevich ordered from the front that Sukhomlinov be replaced as a matter of urgency, and the tsaritsa wrote to the tsar to warn him that Sukhomlinov would be moving against ‘Our Friend’ (Rasputin), which was one more nail in h
is coffin. This once powerful and dangerous man was brought down not by an ordinary Petersburg intrigue, however, but by a tip-off which came by circuitous route from the enemy in Vienna. The presumptious ‘boudoir spy’ Yekaterina Viktorovna had most incautiously begun leaving letters for Altschuler with friends, their friends and their friends’ friends, in which she enclosed various lists from the Russian Army supreme command without understanding their worth; that booming espionage drum had to be silenced immediately so that the real Austrian spies on the banks of the Neva would again be able to distinguish reliable information from junk. The denunciation arrived via the double agent Viktor Bedny but was actually sent by a military intelligence officer code-named ‘Man of God’.
Not until many years after the war did it come to light that Franz Altschuler was behind that code name. Only a handful knew at the time the affair broke. Sukhomlinov was relieved of his post. A press statement announced the formation of a commission of inquiry “to investigate the former minister’s role in supplying the army”. General Nikolai Petrov, member of the State Council, was appointed to chair that commission, but that is of no importance for this story. After the fiasco of their joint careers, Zeus Sukhomlinov and Hera Sukhomlinova were . . . But what does that matter? Perhaps their fate, too, is of no significance in this tale about the war because the masses are only interested in glossy life-stories and days of guillotining. Who cares what happens to a head that falls into the basket and where the decapitated body is carted away to afterwards.
The decapitated body is of course taken to a mortuary, but it was hardly likely that the body of Vladimir Alexandrovich Sukhomlinov would end up on the table of Mehmed Graho in Sarajevo, especially since the case of the Russian minister of war was hushed up and no one touched a single reddish hair on his head around his ears, so for many people it wasn’t even a proper story. Neither could the Sarajevo pathologist’s last days in 1915 be turned into any kind of story — except perhaps in his own head.
After the crushing defeat of the Austrian army at Mount Suvobor, Graho too hastily withdrew with his staff from the old hospital in Yatagan Mala in Belgrade, where he had settled-in nicely. He returned to Sarajevo and found the first signs of cholera in the population, forcing him to team up with the epidemiologists. The events left him speechless. He became infected himself and died two weeks later. The superstitious would say it was because he used up his year in playing doctor of death. The less credulous would look at the pathologist’s last words, which might tell us how he became that so-called doctor of death. But Graho didn’t utter any last words. A nurse was the only person nearby. He didn’t even manage to wear in the new shoes he had bought on the eve of 1915.
Yet the story of the death of our doctor of death could go something like this, based on the information that remains about the man: the pathologist who was the first to examine the corpse of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the flaccid body of the Duchess of Hohenberg breathed his last in the midst of a magnificent reverie. Before dying, he fell in love with the nurse caring for him. When the disease was well advanced and his once corpulent, well-fed body began to lose a litre of fluid per hour, Mehmed Graho imagined he was very handsome. He dreamed up a picture of himself and presented himself as such to the attending nurse. On the third day, the skin hung limply from his chest and sides, and his nipples sagged like the udder of a skinny cow. In his imagination, however, Mehmed Graho was ever more good-looking. In a flight of madness between two deliriums he convinced himself that he was irresistible. Why else would the same nurse keep leaning over him so devotedly and wiping his forehead with white gauze?
He died at a moment when the whole room reeked of his excrement, just when he appeared on his inner perceptive horizon as a paragon of manliness, clad like a Syrian prince from the Arabian Nights, and was intent on declaring his love for the nurse. But his words failed and he succumbed. The body bound in his shrivelled, almost parchment-like dry skin was infectious, and the grave-diggers immediately took it to the cemetery in Bare for cremation. All that remained of Mehmed Graho was a pair of broad, orthopaedic shoes and a pocket watch. No one came to claim them because the pathologist had no family. The shoes were given to the Austro-Hungarian Red Cross, and the watch was sent to the front for a soldier to wear.
What became of that pocket watch sent to the Great War is not known, but yet another timepiece, on the Western Front, caused no end of confusion. It was the alarm clock which rang at the French positions near Vic-sur-Aisne at exactly ten o’clock each morning. When even all the cuckoo clocks sent from Prussia were unable to drown it out, one German soldier began calling out to the French across no man’s land. He was a student who knew their language. No one dared to lift his head up over top of the trench, so this conversation in murdered French and butchered German lasted for days. But even after that, no one understood why the alarm clock rang, up until the day when a ceasefire was agreed and the wounded had to be collected from everywhere they lay. The student volunteered to leave the trench together with the stretcher-bearers. But, unlike them, he didn’t start going up to the frozen bodies of his comrades; he went straight over to see the French. Foreign faces gazed at him with suspicion but bore a remarkable resemblance to his own. Students or grocers, painters or mechanics — all of them now had war imprinted in their eyes and had come to resemble each other like identical twin brothers. But those brothers were there for the business of killing, and only one day was allowed to be different. That day, the German student sought an explanation for the alarm clock ringing at ten o’clock — and found it.
It was so simple that he couldn’t believe it at first. The alarm clock sounded because one lieutenant of the French 86th Regiment had promised his wife in the city of Touraine that he would let her know he was still alive by ringing the alarm clock at the same time every day. In return, she wound up another alarm clock so that it rang at the same time to tell her beloved husband she was still true to him. The German soldier returned to his trench and started to laugh. And he laughed long and loud, thinking of all those stories, forebodings and the dozens of Prussian clocks with their belligerent cuckoos. His comrades had to wait quite a while for him to stop his uncontrollable laughter, which almost made him choke, and tell them why the alarm clock rang precisely at ten. The other soldiers didn’t find it so funny, especially those who had written to their wives asking for clocks of their own. The alarm clock continued to ring, only now it wasn’t an ominous sign in the German trenches but more like a ten o’clock gun firing to give the exact time, and both warring sides long set their watches by the French lieutenant’s alarm clock.
No one knows whether the alarm clock in Touraine rang with the same regularity, every day at ten. If someone had walked through the streets and asked the townsfolk if they had heard of the alarm clock, many would probably have said they knew nothing. In those wartime days in Touraine, people spoke a lot more about the war of two lady wine merchants who upheld the fame of their husbands’ wineries and supplied the wine for two famous cafés in the capital: the Rotonde and the Closerie des Lilas. Although this war began in Touraine, it didn’t actually take its course in this little town where Rabelais and Descartes were born, but in Paris, where two publicans took to the warpath: Old Libion, who ran the artists’ hang-out Rotonde, and Old Combes, proprietor of the artists’ tavern Closerie des Lilas.
It all began because of bad wine, and as such the ‘winery war’ started in Touraine. But it would have remained a small, local conflict of two amazonian wine merchants, had not two old men got involved. Victor Libion was proud of his café La Coupole, but he was particularly fond of the Rotonde, which he had set up in 1910 on the corner of the Boulevards du Montparnasse and Raspail. Libion, who was portly and a bit of a boor, bought a hole-in-the-wall café here and turned it into a meeting place for artists. This was where people started their drinking, and before the Great War they also finished it here. Victor Libion never liked competition, so he naturally viewed Old Combes with suspici
on. The latter, in turn, didn’t like the former and claimed that the ‘so-called gentleman’ served stale food and sour wine, and that people only went to Old Libion’s after they had had a good meal and tanked up at his café. Old Combes didn’t conceal that the Rotonde had much greater turnover and that there was infinitely more garbage left there after the guests in the mornings, but he stuck to his story: people came to his place to eat and drink, and then the drunken ‘bohemian loafers’ went to Libion’s, well sloshed, to tell cheery tales which attracted greenhorns from the provinces and transatlantic bumpkins who thought they would become painters as soon as they heard a single joke of Picasso’s or joined in a punch-up on the terrace of the Rotonde.
The conflict between the two café owners simmered like this up until the really big fracas broke out, the Great War. Then it seemed both of them would relent because the Rotonde and the Closerie des Lilas would soon run out of guests. But things turned out differently: the vagabonds, cowards, armchair patriots, cripples and draft-exempted were not so disheartened that they stopped going to Old Libion’s. If the truth be known, they became significantly fewer in number and garbage swirled between the empty tables on the terrace of the Rotonde, but the number of guests dropped by half at both cafés, so the proportion remained the same. At least until the day a guest was found dead at the Rotonde.
The Great War Page 16