The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  Not everyone had been a hero. Not everyone kept quiet.

  Many silhouettes with a guilty conscience were fleeing Belgrade. Among them was the seamstress Zhivka. She realized she had to leave her cosy tailor shop. None of her assistants urged her to stay, nor did she try to persuade any of them to go with her. She knew everyone would look at her askance after the fall of the capital, so she decided to leave the city shortly before the end. She led her blond son Eugene by the hand down to Sava Quay, where a deafening clamour reigned. People were cursing and swearing, shouting to each other and bandying ugly names. Smoke from fires mingled with the throng of people pushing and shoving and treading on each other. A boat capsized in the middle of the river. The horses it had been carrying were drowning in the swollen waters; their muzzles desperately broke the dark surface and their nostrils inflated. Zhivka got into a fishing boat in Bara Venecia. The cantankerous owner agreed to take her for an immodest sum of money; he realized it was daylight robbery and almost felt guilty. He pushed out through the middle of the marsh and entered the current of the river. The horses had disappeared. Had they drowned or perhaps struggled to the bank? It didn’t matter. A low fog descended on the Sava. Eugene slept, and Zhivka got up and stood straight like a little heroine — her, the seamstress who had once owned a shop with a change room where people vanished into the distant future. She cast a last glance back. Belgrade rose up out of the fog like a jewel, the pride of a prematurely frozen land. But it was no longer her city, no longer her 1 November, and certainly not her 1918. Nor was she any longer herself. Only Eugene still had a future. Only Eugene. For Zhivka the seamstress, the Great War ended when she turned her head towards Zemun and the Austro-Hungarian border and there saw the roads, whose illusorily straightness would only lead her in circles from then on.

  The next day, everything was back to normal in Belgrade. The clamour of guilty consciences at the quay climbed the steep streets of Savamala to the inner city during the night, and on 2 November the capital celebrated victory loudly and boisterously; it was hard to believe that people had been so hushed and silent the previous day.

  Then 11 November 1918 came. The Great War was over.

  Many Belgraders reflected on what peace would look like. No one believed that the war had ended that day and everyone was waiting to see that peace, as if it was a mighty demiurge or simply a rainbow which would reward the one who ran under it first. A certain criminologist was destined to be the first person to see a sign of peace, but for him it did not resemble a rainbow stretched across the sky. No, he sighted that ‘Beethoven’s forest’ intellectual again. He had been flown in, probably without touching one clod of Serbian soil. Not even a stray bullet would have had him. Dr Reiss saw young Mr Kapetanovich on the other side of Teraziye Boulevard. There he was: hurrying along, no longer dressed in a bluish-grey army coat on that muddy day, beneath thick clouds which dropped a dirty rain mixed with sleet. No, he was now clad in a white civilian suit. He went along the streets of the capital with a white handkerchief over his nose and beckoned freakishly from the opposite pavement, like a creature dead inside but outwardly alive, as if to say: you must come over, my good sir — step in the mud, tread in the puddles gaping like seas of quicksand, because I am peace. What was the criminologist waiting for? He just had to stride over towards that man in white on the other side of the road; that figure, his face powdered and creamed, with dyed hair and a grin which horribly creased and contorted his features, who was calling him to come over. Archibald Reiss was thus the first to see peace — peace dressed all in white — but it didn’t bring him anything resembling happiness. He just turned away, disgusted, and made his way down to Savamala, where he leaned up against a grey building, breathing heavily and fighting for air.

  Maybe that Swiss criminologist was up too close. Peace can look quite different in foreign climes to how it looks at home. As soon as King Peter heard at his residence in Greece that Serbian troops had entered Serbia, he ordered that all his things be packed into five large suitcases. Soon he repacked the most essential things in three suitcases. He stopped and thought for a moment, and then reduced his luggage to one suitcase. He threw that aside, too, and took only one small bag, which he had recently acquired. Where did he get it from? Not long ago, someone had given him this rather ordinary camel-hair bag as a gift, saying it had belonged to an oriental trader and travelled half the world. Who was it who had brought him this little caravan bag? And why had it been given to him, of all people? The king couldn’t remember, but he recalled that he had taken it with reluctance at first.

  Now he decided to repack only the most essential things in that camel-hair bag. He ended up hardly putting anything in it, but that isn’t important. Gradually, like a desperate geriatric, he became ever more attached to that only piece of luggage he cared for. He even called it ‘my camellia’. The hide was dark red on the back, orange at its curves, and bristly on the front. This strange piece of baggage started to shape strange thoughts. King Peter began to believe that the little travelling bag would help him return to the Fatherland too.

  Several days later, King Peter started to feel unwell, and on 19 October 1918 he suffered a stroke. Although his subsequent recovery was slow and difficult, he didn’t let the ‘camellia’ out of his sight. As soon as he was able to stand again, he examined its contents once more and telegraphed his son that he wanted to return to the liberated town of Belgrade straight away, even if he had to travel via Dubrovnik and Sarajevo. He looked at the motley camel-hide bag and was convinced it was calling on him to take that journey, but he was mistaken. The plans for the trip were deferred. The regent was against his father returning before the formal act of unification of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Days passed, and the old king didn’t realize that the ‘camellia’ was actually his anchor, pulling him down and holding him in that pleasant but foreign suburb of Athens. So it was that the Great War ended for the old man in contemplating that cursed camel-hair bag, which after ending the life of a trader in oriental spices now entangled the life-threads of a king.

  Much later, King Peter would return to his Fatherland. But that would be in a new life, and he would be a man marked and marred by his stroke, unable to even sign a legible signature on his Act of Abdication. When it was finally time to leave on that journey, old King Peter would be unable to find that little camel-hair bag which he should have thrown away without thinking, back in 1918.

  I AM NOW DEAD

  ‘I am Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary de Kostrowicki. I am now dead. The shrapnel from March 1916 finally caught up with me, a good two years after it came whistling up and hit me in the head, hissing like a savage cat which has come late to February mating. It is 9 November 1918 at three o’clock in the afternoon, or a few minutes thereafter. Every comma of my eyelashes has died, and my huge pear-shaped head is beginning to dry from the stalk down. It’s strange that I can describe my path after death, but this is how it happened: I died and suddenly had two bodies. The one lying motionless in bed sank deeper into the linen and the pillow beneath my head. Two men grabbed the second body, this new one, and took me away like gendarmes. First of all, they dragged me off to the police station. They accused me of having stolen all my life and summarily took me to a lock-up quite like La Santé prison, where I had spent the three most dishonourable weeks of my life. They told me I was dead. I just leered at them and made all the commas of my eyelashes bristle. But they seemed not to care. I heard one of them say: “He has no right to any visits. Even the advocate of the dead isn’t to be allowed to see him for three days!” In the registry I was given a shirt, towel, sheet and blanket. That further convinced me that I wasn’t dead, because what does a person need all that for if they’re dead? But I was mistaken. Still smiling from ear to ear, I pulled the shirt over my strange, translucent body, but since it too was transparent it looked as if I hadn’t put anything on over bare chest; I wrapped the towel around my transparent neck, and it too ceased being visible
. Only then did I realize that I was probably dead.

  ‘They took me away to my cell. It was exactly one hundred and eleven steps straight on, then seventy-six down the right-hand corridor, and twenty-two more straight on, and then ten quite strange steps backwards — and there I was at my cell. The door slammed shut behind me by itself. Then I heard the latch. I was locked up. I longed to sing and write beautiful poems, but even my verse was empty and everything I put on paper left no trace. All I could hear was the melody of quatrains. I didn’t understand what was going on. It was maddening in the extreme. I spent one, two, three sleepless nights in the cell and kept asking myself one and the same thing: why is it not transparent too? As if in answer to my question, on the fourth day the rear wall of my isolation cell began to pale and grow thin.. Finally I touched it and it tore like the cobweb of some evil spider I had written about. I passed through that hole in the cobweb into a wide field, and there I saw many, many people; it was as if a whole town was there in front of me, all the people of a city, like Paris with all its inhabitants standing and waiting. Some were in large groups, others stood alone. One of them told me these were all the French victims of the Great War. Oh my God.

  ‘The victims started coming up to me, and each of them asked for a piece of bread and a drop of water. First of all, there were fifty French heroes of Verdun, all of them wearing new boots: Marin Guillaumont (the victor of three proper duels), Jean Louis Marie Enteric (with a suicidal look), Pierre Jean Raymond Faure (nicknamed Biveau), Lucien René Louis Renn (a man with six names, of which I cite only three), Joseph Antoine Richard (as handsome as a film star), Eugene Fauren Vasin (who fell in the second kilometre of the Battle of Verdun wearing a small, round lorgnette — a statement of better times) and forty-four other heroes covered me from head to foot with their begging hands, and my transparent body was clad in their five hundred fingers!

  ‘I pushed them away with effort because I wanted to see more of that field-of-the-dead. A lieutenant came up to me and said his name was Germain D’Esparbès. He told me he had played cards with the dead near Lunéville in 1914. He wasn’t able to finish the tale and I didn’t manage to ask who won that ghostly game because the next fellow now barged up, pushing D’Esparbès aside. It was Lucien Guirand de Scevola, and he said he had organized the first wartime drama in a broad section of trench dubbed “Hotel Ritz”, but he couldn’t finish his story either because I was now approached by Stanislaw Witkiewicz. He was looking for his wife, who had died of tuberculosis in heart-rending agony in the first year of the war, and asked me if I had seen her. “No, I haven’t,” I told him, and then I saw my machine-gunner Chapelant. He was still sitting and writing home on Old Birot’s postcards, which folk told me were magic and really did keep writing themselves after the soldier had died. “That’s enough,” a voice boomed, “stop all going up to him like Ulysses. He has no right to that.”

  ‘“Wait,” I yelled: “I don’t want to die before I’ve found love here — I almost said the love of my life — because I have to love when I’m dead too, you know!” Someone seemed to call out to me from afar. There she was: a tiny girl, but a real beauty. She was wearing a long white-fur coat down to her ankles. She was looking at me and came up close. Mata Hari! How lucky I am. She pressed her body against mine. She unbuttoned the fur coat and hugged me, and I felt her bare breasts, hips and thighs. Then she lifted her deathly pale, emerald leg and wrapped it around my waist. My male member was still alive, but my sense of smell too, it seemed. I smelt blood. “O Mata Hari, the silver fleece of your breasts is red and glistening. Look, a trickle of your blood has soiled my uniform. I still love you, but now I am dead.”

  ‘What a vast sea of the dead, and I was one of them. I saw so many there whom I knew and recognized. But I had to check who wasn’t here, so I called out: “Has anyone heard if Picasso is here? The painter. The Spaniard. No? Good then. André Salmon! Saaalmon, old chum, what about you? He’s not here either, thank God — therefore he’s alive. Old Birot, is he here somewhere? No? Great. And Old Combes? Him neither. Very good, Paris will be able to go on after this massacre.”’

  ‘My name is Yuri Yuriev and I am now dead. Whether it’s for real now or just another farce, God only knows. I was an actor — the leading player of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. I returned home to the house in Liteyny Avenue in 1917 half dead, and I think I have reason to say: Russia was the end of me! You know, I toured my country in the hope of finding a province without revolution: an untainted district with its governor, postmaster, charity lady and local landowner with three hills of cherry orchards . . . but it wasn’t like that anywhere. My tour of Russia brought me back to Petrograd a broken man, and then the unthinkable happened.

  ‘No one recognized me any more. I realized straight away that I was unwanted. I had left, fled, and my theatre continued to put on new plays without me. So I tried to remind the older actors of my existence, but no one could remember me. I was so amazed. I flew into a rage. It all dented my self-esteem, but then I realized the advantages of my new role as an invisible man. No one in the theatre knew me any more, but the theatre itself still remembered me: I entered the building and strolled along the rows of empty seats, went through the galleries and visited the former tsar’s box; I sank into chairs re-upholstered with red plush, slept, and when I woke up people were walking about all around me, moving faster and faster.

  ‘New managers went up onto the stage and swung their arms as if in bad plays. I didn’t hear what they said, but the tails of their leather coats waved as they shook their fists. I didn’t interfere in the new set-up because I realized I had found my role: I became the only actor of the theatre. I never returned home. People at the former Alexandrinsky Theatre greeted each other, calling out over my shoulders, and some would brush me in passing as if I was a length of drapery that falls to the floor in a sea of folds.I am now a dead actor, but, to tell the truth, I didn’t think of continuing life after this terrible Great War and the even more terrible revolution. If you remember me, you’ll find me in row twelve, seat seven. It’s never sold — it’s always mine. Goodbye, I wish you all the best. And good luck — you’ll need it.’

  ‘I am Fritz Haber, and I think I must be dead after all that has happened, although I haven’t really died or changed worlds, have just received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. But it’s clear to me now, at the awards ceremony, how alone I am. Germany lost the war, although I had poisoned thousands with bertholite. I’ve just been awarded the prize for discovering the synthesis of ammonia, and now I see that I’m dead. Back in 1917, I already calculated how much of me had died. As a chemist, I had to establish the formula of my life. I have that modicum of personal integrity. Then I wrote it down on a piece of paper, which I still carry in my pocket today: “Fifty-two per cent of me has died — only forty-eight per cent is left”. Therefore I am chemically dead. And now? I’m up on the stage in the Swedish Academy of Sciences, dressed in a tailcoat and with impeccably white gaiters atop my patent leather shoes. Everything has to be in keeping with the protocol of the awards ceremony. But look there, a boat is making its way up the aisle between the rows of invited guests. It glides calmly, as if the Styx is flowing there. I see a galley with two rows of oars: the barque of the dead. The ferryman Charon, with a pole in hand, is calling to me: “What is it? Have you changed your mind? We’ve been waiting for you for so long.”

  ‘And I go. I separate myself from my body, leaving my smiling face behind to crease my cheeks and jowls with its artificial grin. The ferryman beckons to me, and here I am at the boat. The others in the vessel see me and wave as if I know them and they just need to remind me of who they are. “Fritz Krupp, Zeppelin bombardier and five-time killer of Ruiz Picasso. The fellow with the flappy ears here is my faithful machine-gunner,” one of them calls out. “Stefan Holm, German and Polish hero,” another says. The others introduce themselves too: “Walther Schwieger, the butcher of Kinsale, commanding officer of the submarine U-20 which sank the Lusitania
”; “Alexander Wittek, student. I ended up in this mess although I was meant to live until 1968”; “Lilian Smith, music-hall singer — I died on the stage singing the ‘Song of Hate against England’”. Hold on, the fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen is also in the boat! He says nothing and just greets me the Prussian way, as a nobleman, by gently lowering his head to his chest. And there is that poor boy with the withered arms. “I am Hans Henze,” he called. “I play piano with the right hand of Paul Wittgenstein and write poems in French with the left hand of Blaise Cendrars.” Finally, oh dear, my wife Clara Immerwahr is in the galley of the dead too. Before she manages to speak, I say: “Stop, this is too much,” and don’t get into the boat after all, and everyone in it looks at me with incomparable sadness. I withdraw step-by-step, until finally, moving backwards with the gait of a crab, I drown completely in my body, which still stands on the stage about to address the Nobel Committee. A figure on the stage finally announces: “Fritz Haber, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry”, and I see myself going up to the stage again. I, the dead chemist, Fritz Haber, am now going to make a speech to all the living in the rows of chairs and all the dead in Charon’s barque. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin, but inside I say: “My dear wife Clara . . . ”’