The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

afterwards to locate a badly scratched Bechstein grand in the deserted city. Then there was no one far and wide to tune it, and the instrument with its open lid bared its strings at him like a shameless nude. An old fellow finally arrived in Brussels to tune the piano, a full three days later, so the concert for the senior officers in the City Hall couldn’t take place until the end of the week. Maestro Huis chose the repertoire himself. He didn’t think of singing arias by composers from enemy peoples; he didn’t dare to sing the aria from Gounod’s Faust or from Boris Godunov, which he liked so much, because the former was in French and the latter in Russian. He thought it best to stick to Mozart, with the occasional aria by Rossini or Verdi (the Italians were still neutral). The concert began at exactly five minutes past eight. Only for a moment did he waver and think he should perhaps have changed from his uniform into a concert tailcoat. He decided to remain a soldier because he thought he’d be performing to ordinary soldiers, but he was surprised when he saw many officers with ladies in the audience. The generals of the 1st and 2nd Armies, Kluck and Bülow, were unable to attend due to the victorious campaign, he was told, which had seen the Belgians thrown back to the North Sea coast and the French to the very outskirts of Paris. Instead, this first concert in ‘liberated Brussels’ was attended by their chiefs of staff, who were great admirers of Huis’s art. Perhaps he was a little affronted that no top generals were present, but he went out onto the stage and sang. Two or three times he had to stop and clear his throat, but for the German officers who missed opera so much the performance was of great satisfaction. The generals came up to him after the concert with tears in their eyes and told him he had brought a piece of civilization to that terrible war. Just then, he realized who the ladies were. They were Belgian and Dutch prostitutes, women who never leave a sinking ship and are satisfied as long as their clients are happy. They too congratulated him and giggled loudly, praising him in bad German, and Huis felt very awkward. Not so much due to those ladies in their worn dresses as because of his singing. ‘I was well out of tune. God, how long has it been since I’ve performed? That concert at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin was the last!’ With these thoughts he departed Brussels and set off after Kluck’s army as if he was a quartermaster supplying them not with beans and chewing tobacco but with stocks of opera songs. That’s why the German generals were so grateful and looked so happy each time.

      Not all generals were so lucky as to have such moments of serenity. The Austrian general Oskar Potiorek had to regroup his routed forces after the disastrous Battle of Cer. The pandemonium on the Serbian Front lasted several days. Wrathful Serbs crossed the turbid River Sava and occupied the territory between the Sava and the Danube in southern Syrmia for several days, burning the stubble-fields and empty lands along the Danube. The unbearable stench could be smelt in Zemun, and soldiers and civilians went about with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those several days saw the rise and fall of Tibor Veres, the Budapest journalist who specialized in offensive letters.

      Veres had come to Zemun full of his own importance, and now he could hardly bridle his anger.

      Veres’s disobedient fountain pen with the blue ink arrived in Zemun too, hardly able to bridle its rage that the censor was no longer writing with it, while the obedient one, with black ink in its chamber, was full of its own importance now that Veres was writing with it exclusively.

      From the very first day, however, Veres performed the mind-numbing work of censorship, so it wasn’t clear why the fountain pen with the black ink was so proud. Like a gold prospector, he had to read a hundred letters to come across just one where he found something significant. One soldier wrote to his mother about how cold he was and that he missed her corn-bread (how trivial!). Another complained that he hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for a fortnight and that the worst thing about war wasn’t the bullets or the hand-to-hand combat but the lack of sleep (not completely irrelevant but a fact already known to the upper echelons). A third wrote to his beloved that when men killed each other they didn’t make human sounds but grunted and groaned like cattle who know nothing of humanity (an example of the declining morale of the Serbian forces!).

      On the second day in Zemun, Tibor’s blue pen was already bored. And although it was writing all day, his black pen quickly became bored too.

      Tibor’s life in Zemun, however, became interesting in those five days. He was billeted to an elderly Serb woman who had formerly run a guest house by the Danube together with her daughter. A large flag of the Dual Monarchy now fluttered in front of the house in the lower Gardosh neighbourhood, and mother and daughter took pride in having sewn it themselves. Tibor had it good in the former guest house. Small and beardless though he was, he felt that the daughter took an interest in him from the first morning when she served him the meagre breakfast and started a conversation in her broken Hungarian. Just when he thought the Great War would turn out to be a boon for him, and that he’d perhaps even marry in Zemun, his own small private war began, one which would end fatally for him. And everything started as a miniscule problem, like when you feel the first stab of pain in a tooth, which is white and healthy looking but full of caries inside.

      On the third day in Zemun, Veres’s black fountain pen became increasingly disobedient. Again he wrote with the one, and left the other lying on the paper. He wanted to report that he had read a soldier’s letter home about the poor prospects of the Serbian army recovering after the Battle of Cer, but it turned out that he had written — with his own hand and in the black ink which had been obedient until then — that the prospects of the Serbian army soon returning to battle-readiness were very good! He had already encountered this problem at the Pester Lloyd editorial office, so this time, too, he waged war with the pens and paper as if they were his only enemies. He decided to punish the recalcitrant new pen with the black ink, which he had glorified until just recently, and return to the old one (which he had rejected in Pest for the better one with black ink). And all seemed well at first. The disobedient Pest pen became the obedient Zemun one; but the once obedient black fountain pen from Pest had no intention of backing down and, with thoughts as black as the ink which were its lifeblood, began to plot its revenge.

      Veres didn’t notice anything at first. For the whole fourth day of his brave censorial war-making he wrote precisely what he wanted — in blue ink; but the pen with black ink revealed its vengeful nature for the first time by furtively discharging its entire fill of ink into Veres’s bag. The censor cursed it and decided to no longer take it with him to the City Hall building where he worked. He left the gutted pen with its stained nib on his bedside table. His fifth and last day in Zemun dawned.

      Veres worked arduously on the fifth day, too.

      His black fountain pen thirsted for vengeance all day long.

      That night, what had been festering had to come out. When the assiduous censor returned from work after nine in the evening and was good-nighted without any supper by the devoted but mystified Serb ladies, the fountain pen was ready and waiting for him on the bedside table. Tibor had a wash at the porcelain basin and fell into bed, groaning with fatigue. He didn’t dream anything that fifth night in Zemun, and only at first light did he suddenly turn over, like a person who wheels round after having been caught unawares from behind. He grasped his chest for a moment, gurgled and went limp. No one was there to witness his death.

      The Great War ended for Tibor Veres when the attentive mother and daughter found him with the fountain pen sticking in his chest. The perfidious stylus had somehow risen up and, like an abandoned mistress, taken revenge on Tibor Veres, killing him with a last stab, although it broke its own spine, or rather its nib, in the process. No one at the coroner’s office thought that the censor — such a modest and retiring fellow — could have killed himself, especially in such a theatrical way. The mother and daughter were therefore in hot water, but they were saved by their Hungarian bloodline on the maternal side and the connections in Pest which they immediately used to avoid any adverse consequences for the killing of a Hungarian non-commissioned officer. After five days and five nights of warring, Veres was buried in chaotic circumstancess behind the guest house, in the Zemun cemetery beneath John Hunyadi Tower, with the briefest of military honours. There was no time for a longer service because Zemun fell the very next day, after the three-day Syrmian offensive by Serbian forces. The new army immediately began questioning Serbian residents in their houses, and Veres’s death even turned out to be of benefit for the mother and daughter from