The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

to steal an Austrian uniform and stroll the streets and drink wine with the occupiers as if he was one of them.

      The editor concealed from Bura how popular he had become so he wouldn’t ‘get a swollen head’, but the cheerful journalist returned to his little house in Savamala, content with life. Bura was not what you call handsome: he had just a little hair around the ears, his face was tipped forwards as if someone had pulled his nose and twisted it out of shape while he was still inside his mother, and his forehead was a sea of wrinkles. Not to mention the creases around his eyebrows and eyes. But Bura was happy despite his less-than-attractive appearance. Besides, he was a ‘peaceful journalist’, not a rabble-rouser or a noise-maker. He lived with his elderly mother and his wife, Stana, with whom he had no children. It seemed nothing could disturb the harmony of that home, to which Bura brought everyday cheer. Contrary to Serbian customs, his mother didn’t quarrel with her daughter-in-law, and both of them loved Bura. But then typhus moved into the journalist’s house. First his mother came down with the disease and very soon died. She was buried the same day as Bura’s column fielded the pieces “The Nightmares of Herr Schwarz, Administrator of Belgrade” and “Arbod the Clerk Protects Skadarska Street”. Bura didn’t descend into sadness because of his mother. ‘She was old — as long as she had a good death,’ he said to himself, still cheerful in spite of the loss.

      But two weeks later, Bura’s wife also fell ill. She had a raging fever and her once pearl-like teeth were covered in a black scum. She suffered greatly and in the end just sank into the pillow and directed her last glance towards her husband. She was buried the same day as the popular journalist’s pieces “With Russia Behind Us” and “The Waiter From Café Macedonia” went to press. Bura stood by the shallow grave, which the undertakers had scarcely managed to scrape, and burst into tears. He wept bitterly as if he had been abandoned — as if he was his wife’s son, not her husband. He returned home and thought that his innate cheer would see him through, but the empty house where every step echoed made something in Bura snap.

      His colleagues didn’t perceive any change at first. He skilfully hid his intentions and outwardly remained the ‘cheerful Bura’ they knew, and he edited the “While They Were Here” column for a little longer. But after a while the people around him began to notice he was changing from the good-natured shrimp of a man into a rude and ambitious journalist quite unlike his former self.

      He soon demanded of the editor-in-chief that he be promoted, and he laid claim to the editorial column. He said he had made a name for himself through his regular column and now wanted to follow the adversities of the enemy: hunger, contagions and fiscal ruin. The editor had no objections. Moreover, he took to the idea immediately: an embittered journalist was just the right person to chart the enemy’s woes. That is how Bura was promoted to editorial writer. From that day on, he went to the quay on the River Sava every morning and was given the imperial and royal press of the ‘k and k’ monarchy from lads who reeked of coal dust from the holds of barges. They only ever exchanged a few quick words, but not because it was still so cold in Belgrade. A mild change had come from the south and wet snow now fell on the bare heads of the couriers. Bura and his informants were in haste: the boys because they were risking their lives by delivering him newspapers in German and Hungarian, and Bura because he found no time to be affable towards them. He paid them and took the papers without a single word and without the slightest sign of mirth on his once jolly face.

      Afterwards, he wrote about things he hadn’t read in the enemy’s papers: that Germany was on the verge of bankruptcy, that famine was ravaging the villages in northern Hungary, and that desertion from the Austrian army in the east had reached such proportions that Russia would soon be sending trainloads of Serbs to Serbia. The editor became very fond of Bura and considered that life’s adversities had steeled him into being a great journalist. But he misjudged his jolly editorialist.

      Bura was in fact greatly upset and despondent to the point of despair that not one Serbian newspaper was saying a word about the typhus epidemic which had cut down his family. He devised a little intrigue and executed it audaciously in his front-page editorial in Politika. He heard that cholera had broken out in Austria-Hungary and proposed to report on it regularly. Needless to say, the proposal was accepted without opposition, just as the counter-proposals about reporting on typhus in Serbia had been rejected out of hand. ‘Cholera’ thus became the most common word on the front page of Politika in early January 1915, but in Bura’s pieces it was really just another name for typhus. And so the once merry Bura, who used to speak in confidence with the oxen at the railway station, devised his own plan. He had constant access to the secret figures about typhus in Serbia and devised a way of publishing them.

      He looked at the list of counties in Croatia, which was part of the Dual Monarchy, and paired up each of them with a Serbian district. The county of Syrmia in Croatia played the role of the Morava district in Serbia, the county of Pozhega was actually the Levach district, Karlovac county corresponded to Machva district, Sisak county to Shumadiya, and so on. Zagreb, of course, represented the Serbian capital Belgrade. The main city of each county was then given a ‘twin city’ in Serbia, and in this way Bura was able to begin publishing the number of cases and fatalities from the Serbian typhus epidemic on the front page of Politika — under the guise of diligently tallying the number of cholera cases in Croatia. Now he just needed to make his ‘code book’ public. He was preoccupied with the idea of producing an anonymous leaflet, but he abandoned the idea because he knew he would quickly be caught, and there was no need for that. Several of his most vocal colleagues spread the story by word of mouth, and now all readers could easily inform themselves about the ‘illicit’ typhus situation in Serbia.

      People from the Morava district followed the ‘cholera situation’ in the Croatian county of Syrmia. If they had relatives in Chachak, they looked to see how many ‘cholera cases’ there were in the Croatian regional centre of Tovarnik, and if they were interested in Ivanjica, they kept an eye on the figures which Politika published for the town of Shid in eastern Croatia. Belgraders were well informed thanks to the details on the “development of cholera in Zagreb”, so it is easy to see how this trickery managed to go undiscovered for months. Neither politicians nor journalists had an ear for the people who bought Politika and repeated ‘God bless you, Bura’. Secret agents were dispatched but failed to find a lead, so ‘Bura’s bulletin’ was able to come out for another ten days, up until the moment when the journalist himself started to feel the first signs of typhus. First he felt exhausted, then he lost his appetite. That didn’t worry him in the beginning because, small and thin as he was, he hardly ate anyway. But then Bura began to get drowsy. He came in with puffy cheeks and dark circles under his eyes and published his bulletin for the day, which he considered a crucial task. The editor suggested he take a few days off, but Bura declined. He started to feel a pain in his limbs and then, just as he was finishing the list for the next day with his last strength, the number of “cholera victims in Zagreb” rose from 1,512 to 1,513.

      The 1,513th victim of typhus in Belgrade was a journalist, the formerly merry fellow with his trademark broken, black umbrella, Pera Stanisavlevich Bura. His death meant the abrupt end of the bulletins on cholera in Austria-Hungary, but for a long time readers retold strange stories about ‘Bura’s code book’, whose secret neither amateur informers nor professional Belgrade spies had been able to crack. That is how the Great War ended for the 1,513th victim of typhus in Belgrade on 16 January 1915, by the old calendar.

      The Great War ended that same day for one apprentice in the distant Caucasus, but his guardian, Effendi Mehmed Yıldız, would not find out until later, the day a large fire broke out in Istanbul’s Emirgân neighbour­hood. It was fated that the trader hear bad news during the fire. Fires were an inseparable part of the five-century history of Istanbul and the people of the city always had to be prepared for their wooden houses by the Bosporus and all their property to fall prey to the flames. In spite of that, or maybe precisely for that reason, fires remained an unavoidable fact of social life, and when a fire broke out hundreds of closet pyromaniacs — children, women, the idle and the elderly, and even pashas — gathered to watch the sparks flying into sky and to catch a whiff of the pungent smoke wafting to their nostrils from the charred beech-wood.

      It was the beginning of February 1915 when the paint factory caught fire. The