This other man, a certain Sergei Chestukhin, who began to live a life not worthy of being chronicled, hurriedly departs this novel and merges with the dust and smoke of everyday life. He does not stand out from all the others. Even if someone stopped one passer-by after another in the street and peered into their faces, they wouldn’t think this pale, drawn fellow was the former wartime hero and truly remarkable neurosurgeon, Chestukhin. Now the doctor did everything as others did. Like everyone else, he didn’t hear of the death of the tsar’s family until long afterwards; like everyone else, he didn’t believe it at first, and later he found no emotion inside of him; and like everyone else in Russia, he never dreamed of the tsar.
It was 17 July 1918 when the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family were killed in Yekaterinburg. They were woken in the middle of the night by their drunk, slurring guards, who mumbled that they were being taken to the lower rooms of Ipatiev Palace for their safety, whereas in fact they were to be executed. And the tsar knew it, but he went to the cellar calmly, convinced there was no need to worry. He knew the guards were trigger-happy, but everything told him that the visions of his dreamers in the future were now coming true: he would go down, stop in the middle of the brightly illuminated empty space, and red-nosed and ruddy-cheeked guards would burst in and try to shoot them; but their rifles would jam, and the commander would curse at the firing squad and try to cock his pistol, also in vain.
So the disinherited sovereign descended into the cellar with a sure step, without hesitation. He carried Tsarevich Alexei, since his son was too weak to walk to the execution by himself. He entered the illuminated space and pretended to believe they had been woken up for their safety. Then the wild guards burst into the cellar. ‘Death to the Tsar!’ they shouted and started firing. Not one bullet got stuck in the barrel, and within just a few minutes all of the family was dead. As soon as the tsar had breathed his last, the years began to race through a time warp and dreamers in future decades began to dream of the tsar. It was 1919, 1921, 1922, 1927, and people kept seeing one and the same dream.
The chef Nikolai Kornilov, since 1921 proprietor of the luxury restaurant La Cantine Russe in Paris, saw the tsar’s family in his dreams as vividly as if they were still alive. In that dream, Polish units loyal to General Denikin marched into Yekaterinburg and rushed to the Ipatiev House to liberate the Romanov family. The killers were unable to unjam their guns, so the tsar was saved at the last minute. Thousands had that same dream. Count Razumov also woke up with a start in 1922 and remembered the scene from his dream as if it was real; there, in the slums near the Pont de Grenelle, he looked up at the blue bruises of the morning Paris sky, with a few wet dawn birds cutting across it. The Russian engineer Andrei Vasilyevich Papkov, a constructor of steel bridges in Belgrade, dreamed an identical dream about the tsar in 1927. When he woke up in lower Dorchol, in a courtyard house rented from a Sephardic Jew, little black moths flitted from one downtown garden to another. Eight years earlier, in 1919, Dr Pyotr Vladimirovich Ritikh dreamed of the tsar in Istanbul; when he woke up with a start, petals of apricot blossom filled the air like eiderdown from a torn pillow. And many, many others also dreamed of the tsar.
But the Great War really did end for Nicholas Romanov, the last Russian tsar, and his family when that ominous volley rang out — the salvo so many dreamers were unable to imagine. With his last strength, the tsar looked up at the bare light bulb and its glowing filament. He felt it was blinding him and that a moment later he would lose his eyesight, but then he truly went blind when the final dark of the shroud fell over him.
The fast rise and hard fall of most tragic heroes is delineated by death; the most unfortunate, however, are punished with life. Roughly in the middle of the pandemic, not knowing that it was wreaking havoc in the Crimea as well, newly arrived, harsh Red Guards placed the Grand Duke and his ‘family’ under house arrest. There were no longer any sentries who could readily be bribed and turned into orderlies and doormen. The advantage was that, being isolated in this way, the Grand Duke could hardly contract the disease; the disadvantage was that he was just one night away from being taken down to the cellar there at the Dilber estate — allegedly for his safety — and shot together with his Crimean ‘family’. But this drama in the Crimea was not a tragedy like in Yekaterinburg, but rather a comedy. Immediately after the grand duke’s arrest, a war of sorts began between the Sevastopol and Yalta soviets. The Sevastopol soviet was hesitant, while the Yalta soviet wanted the duke and his family to be executed immediately. In Sevastopol, the soviet consisted of plump, middle-aged men with balding heads, whose eyes still had a glint of old-fashioned dignity. The members of the Yalta soviet were totally the opposite: tall, thin and gnarled. Their eyes flashed fiercely beneath raised eyebrows, and they reinforced every resolution they passed by shouting ‘Hurraaah!’ or pounding their fists on the table. How many times was the order sent from Yalta, ‘Citizen Grand Duke Nicholas is to be shot’, only to change on its way through Sevastopol and the mouth-to-mouth conveying by reliable couriers into ‘Citizen Grand Duke Nicholas is to be spared again today’. And it was like that every single day: he was just one night away from being killed.
Three weeks saw three acts of this tasteless comedy full of yelling and screaming, order-sending and chest-beating, seasoned with litres of vodka. The final curtain on that crude Crimean stage, where frogs acted as hyenas, was then lowered by the Germans. Under the Brest-Litovsk Agreement, which people’s commissar Leon Trotsky was finally able to sign thanks to no longer being haunted and hounded by those four smiling freaks, the Germans received control of the entire Black Sea coast. Their advance guard, in grey summer uniforms, entered Yalta and Sevastopol in the last year of the war. The revolutionaries changed masks and fled for their lives, no one knows where to. On the way, the good men of the Sevastopol soviet dwelt on those remnants of old-fashioned manners they could dredge up from their memories, while those from the Yalta soviet fled north and further north in compartments of local trains, making lonely resolutions and dreaming of reaching snow and a proper Russian winter, as if it would turn them from frogs into hyenas just like that.
So it was that the Germans came at the last minute and Nicholas Nikolaevich became free again; he was a ‘free’ man, at least in theory. Half his associates immediately fell victim to Spanish Influenza in freedom, but the Grand Duke was still ‘alive’, at least in theory. By the end of the year he realized he would have to go into exile himself. Permanently - for life. He couldn’t take his borzoi dogs along with him, or his estates and his Russia, a country which resembled a myth, whose grandeur could compare only with the unattainable loftiness of Hellenic kings. Where to go? To the south, where shallow rivers murmured between the roots of orange trees? Or to the north, where the snow would be the only thing which resembled Russia in that baleful, democratic century?
Like so many others, he went to Sevastopol harbour. He was neither tense nor angry. Only his gaze, condescending as once before, looked down on that reality. And that day, his last day in his homeland, was striving to break away from him and bolt as if thousands of zephyr horses were snapping at each other in the air with wide-open mouths, rending the ether like lily-white lace. As he arrived, the cove and the access roads from Cape Kherson and Balaclava Bay were shaken by mighty detonations. White Guard soldiers stood somewhere behind the hills, on the Crimean isthmus. They were dead, like the Peloponnesians of yore, and awaited further orders. And below, by the sea, the docks were brimming over. A very strange procession of refugees came rolling towards the port: magnificent, petrol-less automobiles drawn by six horses, complete home furnishings, ladies with yapping doglets, officers on peasant carts with a suicidal look. You name it, it was there in that procession.
For Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, alias the Iron Duke, twice appointed commander-in-chief of all Russian forces, the Great War ended as he boarded the steamer Konstantin and grabbed for the railing of the gangway as if he was about to collapse. H
e didn’t feel anything at that moment — a north wind was blowing through his heart — but he had a vague notion that ‘history was watching him’, so he felt he ought to show at least a little ordinary emotion although there was none inside him. But he was mistaken in his notion, like so many others, because in exile he would join the same anaemic blood group and become just another ‘man of the twenty-fifth hour’. History turned its back on him right there on the gangway of the steamer Konstantin when he so theatrically grasped for the railing as if he was about to fall into the Black Sea and drown there in the silence of the water, dragged under by the hull of the ship.
The same day that the Grand Duke exited this war novel and became an ordinary citizen, Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler of the List Regiment was blinded by British gas in one of the last offensive actions on the Western Front. It was 14 September 1918 when he was taken to the front-line hospital and given first aid. Later he was transferred to a reserve hospital in Pasewalk. The doctor in charge concluded that the lance corporal had not sustained any lasting injury to his eyes or respiratory tract, and that his temporary loss of vision had resulted from ‘hysterical blindness’, while his momentary loss of speech was the effect of ‘hysterical muteness’.
That hysterical patient roamed the corridors of the hospital in Pasewalk at the very end of the Great War. He walked through those corridors upright and with a proud step like a real wounded hero, even though he was reduced to touching blunt objects and other patients to do so. He couldn’t set down his thoughts in ‘Max Osborn’s notebook’ by himself any more, so he found a young, freckled nurse to do it for him. His sibilant voice could hardly speak the grand words he wanted to record. Although a different name was on his medical card, he introduced himself to her as Max Osborn, the Max Osborn — explorer of the underbelly of Berlin and voice of the heroic Prussian past. He lied that the sketches about German soldiers were drafts of articles he was sending to a tourism journal in Berlin. Directing the hand of that good-natured nurse, he wrote: ‘The German soldiers at the Hindenburg Line resemble . . . ’, but then he heard that the last line of defence had been breached. He tried to burst into tears, but the gauze over his face impeded him. He thrust away the nurse, who had already fallen in love with him, and sat down on the bed. He tore off his bandages, looked around as best he could, and in the pale gleam he saw the patients’ room with its ten beds. Then he spoke to himself in his former, full voice: ‘Treachery! Betrayal!’
For Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler of the List Regiment, the Great War ended when he absconded from the hospital in Pasewalk. His medical documentation disappeared that night, too, because he stole it at the last moment and took it with him.
The Great War was over. Or was it?
SILENT LIBERATION
The Great War was decided, but at the very end it had to be sealed with still more dead. General Franchet d’Espèrey, Commander-in-Chief of the Balkan Allied armies in Salonika, visited Serbian Regent Alexander in his log cabin at the front, near Yelak. They spoke about the breakthrough at the front and about recent victories, but their thoughts dwelt on death. Wholesale death. And when such a calamity is in the offing, who notices a little love affair? It was so ephemeral that it was almost overlooked in the small Salonika street where people quarrel every day at four in the afternoon. No. 24 noticed that love affair. For the second floor of that red, three-storey building it amounted to a scandal, but it was still a small romance in the shadow of wholesale death. Major Radoyica Tatich himself was unable to say how it came about. He only remembered that he was given one day and night of leave immediately before the offensive on the Balkan Front so he could return to Salonika and collect his winter clothing from his small rented flat in 24 Ermou Street. It took him half a day to travel from the Front to the Rear. He didn’t see anything special on the way, and nothing from that day need be recorded. It was the night which the major would never forget.
Later he was unable to explain to any of his lieutenants how he met the British nurse on the evening of 12 September. Her name was Annabel. Annabel Walden. She came up to him like a shadow, a pale-faced woman who looked exhausted. He stopped in his tracks in the dusty street. She stood facing him. Neighbours from both sides of Ermou Street were bickering in spiteful Greek, although it was long past four and now growing dark. Annabel had short fair hair, a round English face, and eyes like two big buttons sewn on with blue thread. The major turned towards her and stood there enthralled, leaning on his left leg which had been numb since crossing through Albania with what remained of the Serbian army. He looked at her, and she at him. He knew he would be going off to his death the very next day and desperately needed a woman. ‘Major Tatich,’ he introduced himself, touching the braid of his sheepskin hat. ‘Annabel Walden,’ she said, as if she had wandered straight out of an English novel from that better, nineteenth century. He offered her his hand. She took it.
He knew only two things: that he had to touch her and that his insides would bloom like an ugly flower on the battlefield if he didn’t spend that last night with a woman. But he was a Serb, and she was English. She spoke English and a little Greek. He spoke Serbian and ‘trench French’. They climbed the stairs to the second floor of that ordinary, red three-storey building. The major opened the door. They sat down together on the bed in his Spartan room. Nothing there bothered them: neither the odour of dankness and coal dust, nor the broken venetian blinds letting in the last rays of sun from the broad bay. There were no romantic props: neither the aroma of almonds nor the distant song of barefooted women. Nothing, yet they fell in love.
He wanted to say something to Annabel but only had his Soldier’s Phrase Book in Five Languages. How could he express his love for her? How could he tell her everything he wanted to say? He began to flip through the pages of the little phrase book, but found nothing of any help in the section entitled ‘Laundry’. Nor did the ‘Post Office’ section provide anything which would explain how to say ‘love’. He remembered how to say he was sick, and he certainly was lovesick if he desired Annabel so much on that last evening before the offensive. He flipped furiously through the pages up to the section called ‘Seeing the Doctor’, and he began in Greek: ‘Den ime kala’, and continued in French ‘Je ne suis pas bien’, and ultimately in English ‘I am not well’. Finally, he added a few desperate words in his own Serbian: ‘Ja nisam dobro’. Then he stopped. He turned the pages again. He didn’t have diarrhoea or stomach pains, and his tooth, which certainly had caries, was not aching; no, everything hurt. Finally he found the doctor’s expression: ‘Donnez moi votre main’!
Annabel seemed to understand and to want to give herself to him. ‘Give me your hand,’ he said and took her by both her cold hands, but she pulled away. He was disappointed. He turned aside a little; she caressed his hair. Finally, he turned his gaze to Annabel again. His shirt was open at the chest now, his penis erect. He no longer knew who he was; he only knew what he wanted. He pushed the Englishwoman down onto the bed, but she slapped him, got up and left the little room. The major was angry now. She had left the room and was standing out in the hallway on the other side of the door. There was now no sound either in the room or in the hallway, and the squabble in the street also seemed to have passed. He listened from the inside, his ear up against the wooden door. She stood just ten centimetres, or four British inches, away from him and clenched her small fists as if she was about to pummel on the door with them. Then she broke the silence. She yelled something in English, and the ever-ready Greek neighbours gathered. Now Annabel slumped to the foot of the door like an abandoned little animal and burst into tears, and the neighbours began to yell and threaten that they would call the authorities. The major heard that, opened the door and let his Englishwoman in again. He closed the door behind them. Finally he shifted to Serbian. He spoke, and she listened to him as if she understood.
‘I once had a mirror, a miraculous little mirror,’ he told her. ‘I entrusted all my fears to it and was madly brave. You should have
seen me at the Battles of Cer, Kolubara and Kaymakchalan, how I rushed and charged. I was the last to leave mud-bound Knyazhevac in 1915, firing behind me with my pistol. I was decorated for bravery three times . . . but this isn’t about me. I had a good friend, Major Lyuba Vulovich. He went too far and got involved in a conspiracy, I don’t dispute it. And those who tried him also went too far. He was sentenced to death. I went to his cell on death row, took him the little mirror and told a lie. I told him it would save him, and I did it just so he would be brave and not blench before the firing squad. My friend was a hero and put up a brave face at his execution in that damned quarry. He died a martyr’s death, and then I took a trip. Why am I telling you this, Annabel? I took a trip by express train overnight to see our king in Athens. “My King,” I said to him, “I had a good friend — a wonderful man, a major like me . . . He fell, he was killed.” And the king? He didn’t remember. Like an absent-minded god with a white beard he said to me: “If he died bravely we’ll raise a monument to him.” Therefore I left King Peter and saw in the New Year 1918 by myself on a platform of Athens railway station. The train arrived one hour after midnight. I got up and muttered to myself: “There, my friend. I‘ve kept my promise. I even knelt before the king, but he too had forgotten you,” and got into the train. But who cares about that now? Does it mean anything to you, Annabel? All that matters now is for me to touch your white skin, because I’ll die before the bullet hits me if I don’t touch you. I have to love you tonight, Annabel. I have a wife back in Serbia. I don’t know if she’s still alive. I’m cheating on her tonight, but I know it has to be this way.’
The Great War Page 47