The Red Dancer

by Richard Skinner

  It was lovely and warm while my mistress was away, a real Indian summer. They said it reached 100° Fahrenheit in Paris, but it was cooler among the leaves and open spaces of Neuilly. Hippolyte and Eric did their work as usual in the garden and Marthe was less bossy than was her wont. One evening, I was locking the doors to the garden when Hippolyte suddenly appeared. It gave me quite a shock, since I thought everyone had gone. I unlocked the door and he gave me a flower. He said it was an eglantine and would spoil soon, so he thought I should have it. He was always giving me little flowers for my room. It smelled beautiful. He said he had another surprise for me. He took my hand and led me upstairs. In my room, he tied several pieces of blue ribbon to the window catch and opened the window. They fluttered in the breeze. He said we had to wait until just before the daylight faded. We lay on my bed together and he kissed my neck. He whispered flatteries in my ear and said, ‘Sex without love can be an empty experience, but love without sex is a waste of time.’ He loved talking in riddles. Just then, I noticed a butterfly by my window. Its wings were the palest blue and had black edges. Soon, there were six or seven butterflies, all flapping around the ribbons. He smiled and said the ribbons attracted the butterflies to mate. That night Hippolyte stayed with me. It was the sweetest night of my life.

  When my mistress returned, she was in a terrible temper. The Ballets Russes had turned her down and she was infuriated because she had never been turned down in her life. I’d never seen her so angry. When a new wardrobe arrived a few days later, the delivery men had an awful bother getting it up the stairs. They complained so much that, when they put it down to rest, my mistress pushed it back down the stairs in a fit of rage. It made a terrible noise and ended up in pieces. ‘Won’t go? Well it will now!’ she screamed and ran into her room. After the men had gone, I filled a bath with valerian and camphor and suggested my mistress should soothe herself in it. She was crying in her room, saying that her trip to Monte Carlo was a bad omen, but I managed to coax her into the bath.

  My mistress was very superstitious. When things were going badly, she said her life was blighted by bad omens and ill-luck. Once, I remember, she had two new mirrors hung on the walls of her bedroom. It was two days before either of us noticed that the mirrors were facing each other. She flew into a fit, saying that it was bad luck to have mirrors facing each other and ordered me to move one of them. Another time, when I brought her morning coffee, she said she had slept very badly and was feeling irritable. She asked me with great concern if it had been a windy night. When I said that indeed it had, she immediately turned maudlin. I asked what the matter was. She told me that in China, the liver is related to anger and that the wind is said to injure the liver. After a windy night, she said she always felt irritable. Well, I didn’t know what to say. Eventually, she put on her black silk peignoir and complained to me that Paris no longer loved her. I said that was nonsense, but she was still sad. She asked me if I would ever like to travel to the East and I had to admit that the idea seemed unappealing to me.

  In the winter, my mistress received a letter from a man called Paul Olivier. She was excited and told me that he was a journalist for Le Matin who had been asked by a university in Paris to address its members on the subject of Oriental temple festivals. He had asked her if she would be kind enough to perform one of her dances at his lecture. My mistress spent a few days happily organising an orchestra to accompany her and very soon everything was ready. On a cold night in December, she kissed me on the cheek and left the villa for Paris, but she returned home much earlier than expected and went straight to her room. I knew that something was wrong. The next morning, I brought her coffee in as usual and, to my astonishment, saw that my mistress was on the floor in tears. Her mattress had been slashed open with a knife and her costumes were everywhere. When I asked what the matter was, she told me through her tears that the orchestra had failed to appear for her performance because they had received a better offer from Sarah Bernhardt’s latest production. She was inconsolable and let out a string of insults against ‘all her imitators’.

  It was after this that my mistress began behaving more and more strangely. Monsieur Olivier came to see her to organise another lecture. As I was serving them coffee in the room facing the garden, my mistress began complaining that her husband had recently dragged her about and beaten her. She even partly disrobed to show him the bite marks and bruises. Both Monsieur Olivier and I were shocked at such behaviour, but I knew, even if he didn’t, that she hadn’t seen her husband in years. Lord knows where the marks came from. Monsieur Olivier made his excuses and left with a worried expression. My mistress began leaving letters lying around. There was one from a Parisian jeweller’s for unpaid bills of 12,000 gold francs. I saw another to a Maître Clunet, offering to sell her villa and horses for 30,000 francs. This worried me, for I didn’t know what would become of me if my mistress sold her villa. One day, she gave me a gold watch and an address in Arnhem to send it to. She said it was a present for her daughter. A week later, it came back unopened. She often disappeared without notice for two or three days and would return and carry on as if nothing had happened. Hippolyte told me that a friend of his had seen my mistress going into a building that was known to be a well-to-do brothel. I didn’t believe it, but Hippolyte shrugged and said, ‘Needs must when the devil drives.’

  During the early months of 1914, my mistress wrote and received a lot of letters to and from Berlin. She did nothing that winter except ride occasionally and drink white wine in the evenings. The hoarfrost every morning was like icing sugar in the garden. Rain fell. The nose of the little Siva in the east corner broke off. Hippolyte was most upset. In the spring, the same officer that had attended her recitals, General Méssimy, began visiting her regularly. I heard him trying to leave the villa quietly in the early mornings. Hippolyte and I smiled to each other, as we had been doing the same thing. In July, my mistress announced she was going to Berlin to perform at the Winter Gardens. ‘If Paris no longer wants me, then Berlin does,’ she said. We prepared her baggage for the trip and she left the next morning, saying she would be back in two weeks.

  After three weeks, she hadn’t returned and there was no word from her. Eric said he was worried, but we all decided to stay put for the time being. On the day that Germany declared war on Russia, a telegram arrived from Berlin: it was my mistress asking me to bring her a basket full of costumes and jewellery, as she had secured a run of performances at the Metropole Theatre. She said she was in good health and not to worry. We were all relieved and I set about collecting her things and preparing the train ticket. I left Gare de l’Est for Metz late on the second of August and arrived at the border on the evening of the third. When my train tried to cross the border, some German soldiers stopped it and announced that, as Germany and France were now at war, no passengers would be allowed to go any further without the correct transit papers. The train reversed back along the track into Metz. I was quite frightened. I sent a telegram to my mistress’s hotel and waited in Metz for two days, but I didn’t get a reply from her, so I went back to the villa. I didn’t know what else to do.

  A week went by, then another. Marthe left, then Eric. Me and Hippolyte stayed put for another week or so, but there was still no word. Hippolyte said things would get bad now that the war had started and that we shouldn’t stay any longer. He knew about these things and I trusted him. He said we should go away, so I closed up the villa and we went south to Tours, away from the Boches. With all the men gone to war, Hippolyte got a gardener’s job easy enough, at a château just outside Esvres. With the few savings we had, Hippolyte told me to stay at the village hotel for a while. I spent the days walking by the river, or nosing around the markets in the village. After a couple of weeks, he spoke about me to Monsieur Rousseau, the owner. He lied to him, saying that we were married. I was lucky; Monsieur Rousseau was very kind and gave me a job as a maid.

  I didn’t know then that I would never see my mistress again. I would l
ike to have, for she was good to me. Working for Monsieur Rousseau was pleasant enough, but I loved working for my mistress. I have heard a lot of people say that she was not pretty to look at. Well, that’s not true. Just have a look at her portrait that hung in the drawing room of the villa and you’ll see. All dressed up, she was as pretty as they come. Hippolyte used to tease me about my attachment to her. He didn’t miss the villa at all – the château was more than enough to keep him occupied. The only thing he missed was that silly little statue in the garden. He had a curious liking for it, but I’ve never fathomed why.

  21

  The Black Hand

  In June 1903, King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia were assassinated. Disgusted with the king’s autocratic and corrupt rule, a group of young army officers stormed the palace and found the King and Queen hiding behind a secret panel in their bedroom. They were shot, mutilated and then thrown naked out of the palace windows. One of the coup’s leaders was twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Dragutin Dimitrijevic, also known as Apis, the Serbo-Croat word for ‘bee’. While storming the palace gates, Apis received three bullets from the palace guards, which he carried for the rest of his life. In Belgrade, he was a hero and branded ‘the saviour of the fatherland’.

  When Bosnia-Herzegovina was annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in October 1908, many of Serbia’s top government officials and military personnel met to discuss the ramifications for the Serb majority living in Bosnia-Herzegovina. These meetings, which remained clandestine, gradually evolved into a society dedicated to the unification of all Serbs into one domain. The group decided it needed a leader and approached Apis, who didn’t hesitate for a second. In May 1911, the ringleaders, including Apis, met to agree a constitution.

  Each member was made to swear ‘by the sun which is shining on me’ to organise ‘revolutionary activities in all territories inhabited by Serbs’ and to serve the cause of Serbdom ‘to the grave’. A name was chosen for this secret society: Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, which translates as ‘Union or Death’. Funds were raised by kidnapping wealthy people and ordering them to pay a ransom, or by blackmail. Anyone who had money procured from them was given a small symbol of a black hand, which ensured against further molestation. For this reason, the society became known as ‘The Black Hand’.

  The group became powerful and continued to plot against the Hapsburgs. They found a perfect opportunity in the official visit to Sarajevo by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. His visit was planned for 28 June 1914, St. Vitus’s Day, the day in 1389 that the Serbs had been crushed by the Ottoman Turks during the Battle of the Field of the Blackbirds and which had led to five hundred years of Ottoman rule. It was the perfect day for a show of Serb defiance, but rather than risk being caught themselves, they decided to find others to assassinate the Archduke.

  Gavrilo Princip was born in 1894, the son of a shepherd from the Grahovo Valley in Bosnia. As a boy, he was introverted, preferring to read and memorise poetry than help his father tend the flock. When he was thirteen, he made the brave decision to go to Sarajevo, where he studied at the Merchants School and became involved in the writings of anarchists and nationalists. He began participating in antigovernment demonstrations. During one such student battle with the Sarajevo police, he was wounded by a sabre and expelled from school.

  He drifted to Belgrade, living rough and taking part in café discussions about the prospect of imminent war. The Slavs, Bulgarians, Montenegrins and Serbs were united against the last remnants of the Ottoman Empire. In October 1912, when he was eighteen, Princip attempted to enlist in the Serbian army but was rejected because he was considered too small and weak. He took the rejection badly. In the spring of 1914, his friend, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, showed him a newspaper clipping reporting the Archduke’s planned visit to Sarajevo. Princip read the article but said nothing. While sitting on a park bench later that evening, he calmly announced to his friend that he would kill the Archduke. He asked Cabrinovic if he would join him. Cabrinovic didn’t hesitate and the pair shook hands.

  Cabrinovic was six months younger than Princip and had a similar background. He too had become interested in nationalistic and socialist writing and had even published essays in political journals. For his part in a violent printers’ strike, Cabrinovic had been arrested and jailed. The authorities had pressed him for the names of the strike leaders, but Cabrinovic had refused to co-operate. He had eventually been released but was banished from his native Sarajevo for five years.

  The two young men decided that they needed a third man. They chose Trifko Grabez, another young Bosnian with a history of rebellion. The son of an Orthodox priest, Grabez was seventeen when he had struck one of his school teachers and was expelled. Like Princip and Cabrinovic, he had drifted to Belgrade, where he had performed brilliantly in his studies. When he was approached by Princip and Cabrinovic, he needed no persuasion. He was nineteen at the time.

  The main problem now facing them was how to get hold of the bombs, guns and poison to carry out the assassination. Grabez was in all probability a member of the Black Hand and it was through a series of introductions and debriefings that Apis, by then a Colonel on the Serbian General Staff, was informed of the young anarchists’ plan. What he may not have known is that all three were suffering from tuberculosis in varying degrees. Cabrinovic and Grabez both had weakened lungs, but Princip’s case was worse: the TB was eating his bones away.

  Without ever meeting the trio, Apis organised their training and, during May 1914, all three took pistol practice at a secret location just outside Belgrade. Princip was a particularly skilful marksman – he could hit his target six times out of ten at a distance of two hundred yards. At sixty yards he never missed. When they had finished their training, they were given four Belgian revolvers, six bombs, three vials of cyanide and were sent to Sarajevo.

  In the early morning of 28 June, they met at a pastry shop on the corner of Apple Quay, in Sarajevo. The archduke’s route had been printed in the newspapers and the three of them agreed to disperse themselves at various stages along it so that, if one failed, another would have a chance. Security was minimal and each was able to mingle freely in the crowds while choosing the best spot to lie in wait.

  At a quarter past ten, the six-car royal entourage approached the Mostar Café on Apple Quay, near where Cabrinovic had positioned himself. As the procession neared, Cabrinovic asked a policeman, ‘In which car is the archduke?’ The policeman pointed to Franz Ferdinand, standing out clearly in his blue tunic, high collar and plumed hat. Cabrinovic thanked him and moved off. Hidden in the crowd, he took out his bomb, knocked off its detonator on a nearby lamp-post and threw it at Franz Ferdinand’s head.

  As he had been shown during training, Cabrinovic should have waited twelve seconds before throwing the bomb, but he didn’t. The twelve-second delay saved the Archduke’s life. He deflected the bomb with his elbow and it fell in the street where it exploded, wounding the passengers in the car behind and injuring several people in the crowd. Cabrinovic swallowed the cyanide he was carrying and leapt into the Miljacka river below. Unfortunately for him, the river was at low tide and the cyanide did nothing except make him very sick. Four men leapt in after him and dragged him out. One of them was so incensed that he wanted to kill Cabrinovic. The police intervened and Cabrinovic was taken away for interrogation.

  After the explosion, the police attended to the injured and cleared a way for the entourage to get to the Town Hall, where there was to be a formal reception. Seeing Cabrinovic’s failure, Grabez had second thoughts and fled the scene, depositing his bomb in a nearby basement. Princip’s resolve, however, was still strong. Unnoticed in the confusion, he crossed the street and waited in front of a delicatessen on the corner of Apple Quay and Franz Joseph Street.

  On leaving the official reception, the entourage was due to turn right into Franz Joseph Street on its way to visit a museum. But before anything else, Franz Ferdinand insisted on visiting those woun
ded in the bombing, who were now in a military hospital. This meant continuing along Apple Quay. Had the Archduke’s driver been told of this change of route, there might never have been another attempt on the Archduke’s life. As it was, the driver turned right into Franz Joseph Street and was immediately instructed to stop and reverse.

  While the driver was selecting the gear, Princip had his chance. He realised there wasn’t enough time to throw a bomb. Instead, he stepped forward and drew out his revolver. He was no more than five feet away from the car. He took aim and fired two shots. The first hit the Duchess of Hohenburg in the abdomen. The second pierced the jugular vein in the Archduke’s neck. Both died of their injuries within minutes. In the ensuing struggle, Princip was prevented from turning the gun on himself and was nearly strangled to death. The police used swords to dispel the mob surrounding Princip, who lay injured on the ground. Princip did, however, manage to swallow his cyanide but, like Cabrinovic’s, it did nothing more than make him violently sick. Princip was eventually taken away to police headquarters.

  After two days of interrogation, Cabrinovic and Princip told the police the names of all who had helped in the assassination. They mentioned nothing about Apis or the Black Hand, however. On 1 July, Grabez was arrested and a trial for all three was fixed for 12 October, to be held in Sarajevo but conducted under Austrian law. The verdict, delivered on 25 October, found all three guilty on charges of treason and murder and the judge sentenced them each to twenty years’ hard labour. There was a special condition for Princip: that he was to spend one day a month and every 28 June in solitary confinement.

  During the winter of 1916, both Cabrinovic and Grabez died of cold and hunger while in prison. In his prison in Bohemia, Princip was in and out of the hospital because of his TB and eventually had to have an arm amputated. He died on 28 April 1918.