The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  The town had been almost totally destroyed by French and British shells and the road the soldiers were walking along had craters two metres deep. A dirty rain was falling and got under the men’s collars and into their boots. The Scotsmen who had once been blessed by Father Donovan did not meet a living soul, not even a cat, and when they thought the town was completely deserted they noticed a woman with three small children through a window. The woman was staring away into the distance, with the children snuggled up to her, making it hard to tell whether they were dead or alive. The young Scotsmen approached the woman with caution. They looked at her, touched her and sniffed at her as if they were hungry dogs and she their prey. She smelt of sandalwood, and her children of mother’s milk. Finally they noticed that she was breathing faintly. Both she and the children took one breath every few minutes; they seemed more dead than alive, but breathing was breathing, and that meant life.

  That woman with a face like a mask was neither happy nor sad. She gazed straight ahead with eyes unblinking, and everyone who stood in front of her open window felt she was looking at him and wanted to say something to him. This made quite an impression on the Highland Boys of the Scottish 92nd Division. They had seen death in a hundred ways and renounced all their pre-war errors, but this was something new for them. Some soon confessed their sins to the dead-living woman and her children, others cried before her, others again spoke to her children with different names to see if one of them at least would make an optic nerve flicker. Then, madly in love with her, they tried to feed her because they were frightened she would become malnourished and die of hunger, but they were unable to make her mouth accept a single morsel of food or sip of drink. Her lips were firmly shut, she held her children tight, and they seemed to need no sustenance. The Scotsmen stayed at her side for a whole week and saw that she wasn’t wasting away. She remained alive — if that was the right word — even without food.

  That encouraged them. They set off for the devastated nearby towns, which until recently had struck fear into them, and began to ask around among subjects of the British Empire for faith healers who could perhaps help the mother with her children, whom they had become so fond of. They searched for shamans among the soldiers from the Orient. These men possessed all manner of proficiencies and abilities; alive, in distant India, they resembled the dead, yet they resurrected many dead before the eyes of the living. Several of the Scotsmen therefore called on their comrades from the 2nd Indian Cavalry Division, whose gaze was ever downcast. They saw the silent men with their heads in dusty, blood-stained turbans. Among them, they found several soldiers from the area of Bombay beyond the seven seas, from the red Indian earth alive with poisonous snakes, who were medicine men and faith healers at home.

  One was most warmly recommended to them, and they took him to see the family in Bapaume. Other Indians, weighing only forty-five kilo consisting of loose skin and bent bone, with British uniforms hanging from their haggard frames, visited the frozen family. They sniffed at them too and said they smelled of sandalwood. That was a good sign. They sang special songs around them and then smelled them again. They still smelled of sandalwood, they said — that was a bad sign. In the end, they gave up.

  Soon afterwards the troops were given the signal to move out. They had to go. A hundred soldiers, one after another, took leave of the mother with her three children, but she just stared at them and didn’t shed a single tear when they kissed her, put flowers in her hand, implored her or cried with their heads on her lap. The mask-woman didn’t object when the Indians placed a garland of flowers over her shoulders and painted a red dot on her face and those of her children.

  Now the soldiers really had to go. They left the mother and her children still alive. Or not. She was waiting for liberation or ultimate death. The British and their obedient Indians, wandering shamans in a war which was not their own, had to attack ‘Old Fritz’ again. Magic wouldn’t work in the West. In Central Europe it was the same. But could magic be effective in Russia, a country still awash with wicked emotions, surrounded by savage nations who dreamed solely of destroying it?

  After those many audiences, Tsar Nicholas left Tsarskoye Selo and departed for the Stavka. Was it a strange coincidence that he set off on that last journey so shortly before being deposed? Not at all. The tsar left for the front on 22 February, almost fleeing from the various emissaries and the madness of his wife, who continued to invoke Rasputin even though he was dead. On the Romanian Front he inspected a starving but seemingly still loyal army. Times were hard but he was satisfied. He left for home again and got into his special train as tsar for the last time.

  In the night between 27 and 28 February, two armoured trains set off from Mogilev heading for Tsarskoye Selo and Petrograd. The one with the tsar’s entourage went first, and the tsar’s train followed five kilometres behind. That last evening, too, the last Russian tsar went to sleep in his coach surrounded by his adjutants and ministers of the court. The disturbing message from General Dubensky about unrest in the capital reached the tsar’s train in the course of the night. But it continued on its way, passing the stations of Likhoslav and Bologoyev, and travelling ever deeper into the Russian night and the frozen land controlled by the revolutionaries. No one dared to wake the tsar; His Majesty was not yet to be told. The very next day he would become a prisoner.

  But in that decisive night he was still the tsar. He woke up and remembered his imaginings of not so long ago: of standing on a platform, and a strange train gliding past and taking with it the lights of its compartments. He didn’t manage to speak because everything that was his flashed past in that train. Now the tsar felt as if everything that had once been his had been left behind: he looked through the window, hidden in the dark like a thief, and wiped the fogged-up pane with his sleeve: here was the sleepy station of Malaya Vishera, then the station of Staraya Rus, and finally the provincial capital, Pskov. As he stared sleepily through the glass into that crystal night, which gleamed in heaven and earth as if illuminated, there came a knock at the door and the news: ‘Your Majesty, a message has come from the advance train. No trains can go any further than Tosnoye, they say. Lyuban is already under the control of revolutionary forces. General Dubensky suggests stopping in the old city of Pskov and joining up with the forces of General Ruzsky, with which you could then head to the capital.’

  Then everything began to unfold very quickly. Two nights and one day passed in the tsar’s train like a dream, like a leaden nightmare, in which one piece of bad news outstripped another. On the evening of the next day, the tsar abdicated in favour of his brother, Mikhail Alexandrovich, and became a prisoner. He recorded in his diary: ‘I leave Pskov tonight despondent because of what I have experienced. All around are betrayal, cowardice and lies.’

  And then he left. First of all by train, moving from one station to another, and it seemed as if he was not moving forwards but perpetually going in circles, to finally be lost and not know which part of Russia he was in. The fate of a deposed ruler, perhaps. In the end, he arrived in Tsarskoye Selo, where he encountered a striking example of human wretchedness: when he got out at the station, his courtiers and officers fled before him without a second’s hesitation. Having heard that the tsar had abdicated, they were afraid he might recognize them and expect them to stay on in his company. Instead of being received with warm words and trusted handshakes, the prisoner was met by three strangers: one stocky, and the other two both tall. They took the tsar to an armoured car. The fat man drove, while one tall fellow sat on either side of him on the back seat. Only a little light came in through a slit from the driver’s window. Nicholas caught a glimpse of empty streets, pebbles flung up by the wheels and occasional groups of people who cut across the path of the car, scampering like foxes, weasels or badgers.

  He entered the palace and found the tsaritsa dressed in a black habit with a white collar. He said to her: ‘Alix, you are no longer empress.’ And she said to him: ‘Our time is yet to come. Sit down, and
let us call our friend from the heavens. Our good chief of police, Protopopov, who was able to make the table move, is no more; but we are still here.’ Before the tsar could say a word, the tsaritsa silenced him. ‘I know you wanted to send me away to the French Riviera, my Nicholas,’ she said, ‘and you even negotiated with that fat French ambassador Paléologue, but I forgive you, my dear. I forgive you.’

  At that instant, as if by command, the lady-in-waiting, Anna Vyru­bova, and the great court lady Naryshkina entered the room together with some maids they had taken by surprise. Vyrubova had pronounced dark circles under her eyes, wrinkled like brocade curtains; Madam Naryshkina with the double chin beneath her fat face was virtually blind because of the cataracts on both her eyes; while the maids seemed scared to death. Alexandra stood in the middle and no one dared to refuse. Without a word, she extended her hand to Nicholas, too. He simply replied and took her icy hand. He wanted to decline, but now he no longer saw any reason to avoid that ‘occult ministry’, as all of the tsaritsa’s circle called it. The invokers joined hands. Nicholas’s were taken by the tsaritsa on one side and Naryshkina on the other. All the women closed their eyes. The curtain over the window moved and a ray of light entered the room. Nicholas could hear nothing from the world of ghosts, but the women moaned and called out ‘yes, yes’ and ‘we are here, we are here’. The other-worldly silence was now filled by the tsaritsa, and she spoke in a husky, almost hoarse voice: ‘You will come back. Yes, you will come back. The Russian throne forever belongs to the Romanovs. The Vladimirovichs will accept the throne, those sordid weasels, but they will fast give it back to the Nikolaevichs.

  ‘What do you still have to say, friend?’ the tsaritsa yelled with all her might as if calling into the wind. ‘What do you still have to tell us? Bring us light, bring us more light, friend . . . ’ and there was light, caused not by the occult but the movement of a man, whom the circle could hardly recognize at first because their eyes were now used to the dark. ‘You wanted more light,’ spoke a haughty voice not at all like the sound of a phantasm, and its owner walked the length of the room and closed the doors behind him. The heavy curtain was drawn aside to reveal Alexander Kerensky, the new Russian Minister of Justice. He curtly signalled for the maids and court ladies to leave. The tsar and tsaritsa remained with him. As soon as they were alone, the newcomer kissed the tsaritsa’s hand and offered her to be seated. ‘You don’t need to offer me a chair in my own palace,’ she hissed in that husky, occult voice. The tsar looked at Kerensky, pushed the tsaritsa into an armchair and made an effort to smooth out the situation. ‘You are a fine young man,’ he said, although he wasn’t sure if young man would be an affront to Kerensky, whose age he was unable to judge. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t rely on your services earlier. You’re not going to harm us, I trust?’ Kerensky smiled. The grin clung to his cheekbones just a little too long. All at once, he became serious and the smile dissolved from his face like a spectre. He announced loudly: ‘The former tsar and tsaritsa are to be separated and only to see each other at mealtimes.’

  Thus began the tsar’s captivity — inescapable, undisputed and inevitable — because the revolution continued to seethe beneath the windows of his palace. And just a stone’s throw from there, Russia bloomed in a hundred colours. All those who had been sidelined or repressed, with no choice but to stew and scheme, now flocked to the streets to declare at the top of their voices that they were alive, had a voice, and could glimpse the future of Russia. And all those of the old order, loyal to the tsar, did not flee to the cellars or drown themselves in the Neva, but drew and swung their ornamented Caucasian sabres.

  Tauride Palace, the hub of the new political developments in the capital, was teeming like an anthill with everyone from shabbily dressed folk to those with starched collars. Bosses and heads of staff still acted as such, and counsellors did not consider being anything other than counsellors — none of them could imagine forfeiting their civil-service grade of Peter the Great’s provenance, although a tectonic shift had taken grip of all the known world and a sea change was casting it into desperate, swirling disorder.

  Speeches were held everywhere: in factories, circuses and streets. The theatres were still open and the public gathered there every evening as if they had no work to do the following day. The tsarist eagles were removed from the royal boxes, but young cadets of the tsar’s Corps of Pages, lost in the new times, kept rising and saluting the tsar’s empty box before each performance as if he was still there. Yet the days were utterly different to the cultivated theatrical nights. The streets were patrolled by stern policemen who loved to read; they killed enemies of tsarism who loved to read. The soldiers of the 12th Army, bogged down at the muddy front near Riga, desperately sought for books so they would have something to read.

  Kill and then read — after a massacre you simply had to read something. Nula dies sine linea . . . In these circumstances, everyone’s attention waned. Barriers disappeared, as did old merits, old sins and old debts. After two years of overseeing the Sukhomlinovs’ house arrest, the sentries were suddenly gone from outside the lovely house near the Church of the Saviour. Had they run away? Probably they thought they ought to join the revolution or perish at its hands like happy wretches in a great moment of history. In any case, as of 1 March the ex-minister of war’s front door was no longer guarded. There was theatre outside and a kind of drama inside as well. Sukhomlinov and his wife hadn’t heard that the revolution had begun in Petrograd; or rather, to tell the truth, they didn’t understand its momentousness because their world within the walls of house arrest had strangely warped the outside world and adapted it to the inner realm of silk socks and unwashed pants.

  When the guards fled from the front of their once lovely house and chaos arrived at their doorstep — freedom was there for the taking. The door opened all by itself. After two years of house arrest and with the sentries gone, Yekaterina Sukhomlinova went to the front door. The once stunningly beautiful solicitor’s assistant now had scruffy hair, bulging eyes and breasts bigger than ever before, with two large nipples standing forth. The days of Parisian emollients for her breasts and a uniform for her as general’s wife had long passed. Sukhomlinova walked out of the house just when a group of people were running past like bolting dogs. Two men crashed into her from behind and knocked her to the pavement. She got to her feet and looked at the canal, which shone in the morning sun as if it was flowing or awash with molten metal rather than water. In the distance she caught a glimpse of the Church of the Saviour, wrapped in mist like in the fur of an arctic fox. Then she watched as passers-by frantically attacked one of the shops which still had flour — and closed the door again.

  Her world was different. The greatest lady spy could be a spy queen even in a matchbox, but not with bad dreams like that. As she locked the door behind her, she saw her dishevelled, red-headed, red-moustached Zeus of a husband drowsily descending the stairs into the entrance hall. ‘What’s all that racket, Katenka?’ he asked. ‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘just some panicky people running to and fro. Heaven knows what they want in this wide world. But nothing can harm us here. Let’s just stay at home, darling. My head hurts terribly and I’ve been having bad dreams. Could you perhaps give me a foot rub?’

  However, not everyone thought that one’s home was still one’s castle, behind the bulwark of the threshold. Dr Chestukhin felt unsafe in his house on Runovsky Embankment. He too had considered staying there in the familiarity of home, but the house faced onto the canal and the street, and when a burst of gunfire broke all the windows, he decided to move. But where to? Like every old Russian, he thought of going to a hotel, as if he was on Capri or visiting Paris. When your wife throws you out of the flat, you go to a hotel with your mistress. In 1917, the revolution was that wife, but there was no mistress waiting for him at the hotel. War hero Dr Chestukhin took little Marusya by the hand and pulled along terrified aunt Margarita and the maid Nastia, who had just managed to pack a few things for each of th
em in a wicker suitcase. They ran, evading the bullets and trying to mind their own business in the middle of a revolution, and finally made it to the Hotel Astoria on St Isaac’s Square, opposite St Isaac’s Cathedral.

  The Hotel Astoria, with all its staff, was one of the institutions which underwent a peculiar three-day metamorphosis during the February Revolution, and the doctor and his family would get to know it first hand. The whole building became like a five-storey ship. None of the hotel workers went home any more; rather, the hotel became the home of all its transformed and enlightened employees. How they reached an agreement, organized, and were able to function as one big, self-managed trap for guests in those few days, is hard to say. The revolution was to blame, for sure — such upheavals extract the best from every person and mix it with the worst; just as blood, in septicaemia, becomes mixed with putrescence.

  Such was the Hotel Astoria which Dr Chestukhin entered. Fleeing from the street, he blundered into the hotel and stumbled. He stopped by the revolving doors, regained his posture and smoothed down his hair with what remained of his former dignity; he soothed crying Marusya and stepped up to the reception desk just as if he was on Capri, or in Venice. He rang the bell and then filled in the registration form in front of the amiable hotel clerk. He said he would be staying for several days and waved aside the somewhat undiscerning question: ‘Do you have sufficient money, sir?’ Strangely enough, this convinced the receptionist that the doctor had plenty of money.

  Which was actually true, but Dr Chestukhin would need all the money he had with him in the days ahead because the Astoria functioned as one big collective for catching and wringing out fallen souls. Every little service in the hotel had to be paid for, and the guests were obliged to play the part of big-spender tourists whether they liked it or not.