The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

last year of a war which was to end all wars.

      Mehmed Graho the pathologist, on whose table the Great War had begun, was perhaps the only one who thought otherwise. He scratched the little patch of grey hair on the back of his head and counted on his thick fingers like a child: thirty days, no, forty-two days in Zvornik, multiplied by at least nine moribunds a day, and then at least a hundred more in Belgrade, minus the one or two every day who pulled through. He had been responsible for five hundred deaths at the very least, and then there were all the other doctors of death, generalissimos of death and chemists of death. ‘No, the great calamity is still to come,’ he muttered, without much of a guilty conscience.

      Graho spent the New Year of the boisterous Catholics, and later that of the quiet Orthodox, at home in Sarajevo, and neither of them meant much to him. What was much more important to him was that he managed to find a pair of shoes his size which didn’t pinch his swollen feet on either side. ‘Bravo,’ he said to himself, and thus ended the year of one pathologist.

      1915

      THE YEAR OF THE TRADER

      The pianist Paul Wittgenstein before one of his concerts for the left hand, 1919

      THE SMELL OF SNOW AND FOREBODINGS OF DOOM

      In Istanbul you need to stay for six days if you’re a traveller, six weeks if you’re a Westerner wanting to see only the good face of Turkey, six years if you’re an infidel trader from Beirut or Alexandria and want to make a quick and easy fortune, six decades if you’re a trader and believer who intends to stay on in Istanbul, six centuries for you and your descendants if you wish to merge with the cobblestones, wood, waters and lifeblood of this city on the water, and six millenniums if you’re the Padishah, ruler of the righteous.

      Thus went a popular saying which Mehmed Yıldız, the trader in oriental spices, often repeated in tearooms and in the company of idle coachmen. He himself had almost reached the tally of six decades on the streets of the great city. That’s right, he calculated, unfolding his thick fingers to count the decades on them like a child. In 1917, it would be sixty years since he took his father’s place. His father Husrev Yıldız, a manufacturer and trader in fur apparel, moved from Izmir to the capital in the golden times following the reforms of Mahmud II and opened a furrier’s workshop with an attached boutique, which would become famous among the Jewish traders in Galata. At that time Mehmed was attending rushdi — Islamic middle school — and his mother lay dying, but that didn’t prevent his father from staying at work from dawn until dusk. He offered his wares like a prophet, not a trader. He had a separate stand for every kind of fur. With his body inclined like the Sultan’s wine taster, his head slightly bowed, he would pronounce ‘bison’ with relish as he showed a customer the fine bovine fur; now, bent at the waist like a Western flunkey, he spoke the word ‘sable’ with a ring of importance as if he was saying ‘sailed the seven seas’ and held up his produce, always emphasising its quality; and later, bent almost double in deference, he would mincingly pronounce ‘ermine’ and invite his clients to the back room of the workshop to bargain over a glass of well-stewed mint tea.

      Business flourished, yet Husrev Yıldız was ever more alone, and never himself but someone else. When his wife died of tuberculosis, leaving his son Mehmed crippled with grief, the father didn’t shed a tear but withdrew into his storeroom in the Haseki area and the very next day was offering sable again just like a Jewish merchant. That is how Mehmed Yıldız learnt early in life that there are Turks who find their place and know themselves, and others who wrench themselves out of their culture. The former stay put and wait for the tides of time to either break against them or crush them. The latter go away to study Western medicine, only to realize it is the enemy of humanity; they go away to become Westerners beneath the street lights of Rome and Paris, and learn to understand that Europe is the enemy of Islam; they fall in love with revolution and then see that the more radical its promises are, the further their fulfilment is postponed into the distant future, and the promises thus grotesquely dwindle. The ‘Westerners’ become disillusioned and return, but alas, they cannot go back to their beds because the mould which was made for them has long since shattered.

      That is what the trader Mehmed Yıldız most feared: becoming like those others, resembling his father who presented everything in a false light and said it was good for business because furriers sold not goods, he claimed, but dreams and status. The son therefore sold his father’s fur business without regret as soon as Husrev Yıldız had his first stroke a few years later and in 1857, without reconsidering, left the Jewish quarter; he descended the icy marble of the Camondo Stairs for the last time and put Galata behind him. He set up a spice shop below Topkapı Palace using the money gained from liquidating the fur business, but still he felt threatened by his father’s business lies and falsehoods — as if they could be passed on to him through the air or by blood. For that reason, he wanted only to be a Turk and only to love his helpers. Finally, it seemed to him that he had everything and that he had fused with his matrix, but then the Great War came on the threshold of his seventy-sixth year and sixth decade of trading in Istanbul and threatened to make him one of those others who have to leave the Bosporus after so long and start a homeless life without form and identity. Still, he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Each of his assistants was now in the army but the fronts were all still quiet. If only that winter of his ill temper would pass, which here too, at the gate to Asia, held the threat of snow and low temperatures. The forecast said it would be minus five even by the water, and the wind from Anatolia brought the smell of snow mixed with forebodings of doom.

      The Serbian press did not report whether the temperature in Istanbul fell below zero. But in Belgrade, to be sure, everything froze: iron be­came sheathed in ice, the mighty walls of Kalemegdan fortress congealed to icy rock, and the ground was frozen too solid to even to dig a grave for a dead cat. It was January 1915, the peaceful lull after the slaughter of a whole generation at the River Drina and Mount Suvobor. The impetuous bands of carousing ruffians who had celebrated libera­tion in December 1914 had long since come down with typhus and been decimated, and the winter wind from the Danube and Sava had stolen the mirth from their lips and turned it to morbid moans. Those who were still healthy — neither happy nor sad — went outdoors wrapped in rags. And the smoke from charities’ portable stoves seemed to turn waxen and freeze above the heads of the volunteers who offered passers-by weak, but mercifully hot tea.

      ‘What a terrible winter,’ Politika reporter Pera Stanisavlevich Bura would announce from the door as he tossed his foppish, battered bowler hat onto the hall stand, cast off his frozen-stiff coat and laid aside the decrepit black umbrella he used as defence against the fine snow, which in such cold weather was hardly able to fall.

      ‘Hey Bura, did that plucked chicken of an umbrella shield you from the snow?’ the brash journalists called out, and Bura replied with a good-natured smile. He was one of those people who were happy all day long. He himself didn’t know why. For him, even the Great War began on a day he found especially beautiful. It is a fact that some people are born happy and always look on the bright side of things. This minor journalist of the Belgrade paper was one such person.

      Maybe it was precisely because of Bura’s merry disposition that the editor let him write a column called “While They Were Here: Notes from Thirteen Days’ Occupation”. The aim of this amusing but cynical column was to present a range of anecdotes from the shifty, shady side of Serbia during the almost two weeks of Austrian occupation of Belgrade in 1914, and Bura took the task very seriously. He went into grocery shops, chatted with tough little Dorchol ladies with black-haired warts on their faces, and listened to the gossip of the leisurely world. His colleagues claimed he even spoke with the animals and knew how the occupation had been for every cart-pulling ox in front of the railway station. But these slights couldn’t dent his spirit, and Bura became a household name. People read and enjoyed his stories: about the shrewd young clerk from the Palilula neighbourhood who found a way of getting back at the Austrians; about the superstitious Croatian in the uniform of the empire who was bucked by his horse at the corner of King Alexander and