Mehmed Graho continued to go out into the courtyard, but his words ‘Him, him, and him — to me’ no longer had the same ominous ring as after the Austrian defeat at the Battle of Cer. At first, things on the Balkan Front had gone much better militarily. The army of the Dual Monarchy had seized Serbia in a pincer movement and the capitulation of the recalcitrant neighbour had been in sight. But heavy fighting had developed at the River Drina, which had accepted and carried downstream all the fruits of strife; like the Styx and Cocytus, it took lives away to the insulted River Sava and also to the Danube, that freshwater monarch which heaped a human cargo without name and origin on its deep bed.
There were those who survived this time, too. Head physician Graho again faced a growing mass of wounded, and he passed them on to his surgeons, who pruned them like saplings. And still no one noticed that the hospital in Zvornik had a far higher death rate on the operating table than the collection points in Tuzla, Mostar and Trebinye. But it was war, the Great War, in which a human life was worth less than one word from a general, so no one remarked the poor record of the hospital in Zvornik.
Nor did anyone take any notice when the Istanbul spice trader Mehmed Yıldız realized his beloved Turkey was going to enter the war. Effendi had no family and thought of the young assistants and apprentices in his spice shop as his own sons, but he didn’t tell them when he learnt that Turkey would be going to war. That day too, 28 October 1914, he got into the tram at the railway station below Topkapı Palace, which took him up the hill to the Aya Sofya, where, as a good Muslim, he prayed at dawn every morning surrounded by a hundred other, mainly, elderly men. He noticed there were no more young men at all in the rows of bowing, shoeless believers because the army had been mobilized and many Rumelian Turks were now ‘under arms’, waiting with clenched teeth somewhere in the Caucasus, but at morning prayer he still hoped for peace and progress in the Padishah’s righteous land. After prayer, he thought of going down to the shop on foot, but fine snow from the Bosporus made him catch the tram again. It seemed very early for snow. As the aged vehicle descended the slope by the Golden Horn, creaking and ringing, and circuited the mighty walls of the Sultan’s domain, the effendi thought about the snow and how surprised the Sultan’s nightingales would be when he let them out of their aviaries to fly in his celestial garden that morning after first prayer.
Mehmed Yıldız had been brought up on Nizami’s epic Khosrow and Shirin. He was a defender of the true Turkish miniature, which never departed from the canon of two-dimensionality. Now he arrived at his shop. It was slightly after seven. He looked to see if his assistants had prayed and then gave a sign for the calling out of the day’s prices to begin. He opened the newspaper. Sitting in front of his shop, surrounded by the spices which smelt as pungent that morning as ever, he read on the front page of Tanin that the Turkish government was in crisis. The Minister of Public Works, General Mahmud Pasha, had tendered his resignation, as had the Minister of Commerce and Agriculture, Suleyman Effendi, and the Minister of Postal and Telegraph Services, Oskan Effendi. The Minister of the Navy, Djemal Pasha, and the Minister of Education, Djenan Pasha, temporarily took charge of the portfolios without ministers. It didn’t sadden him to read that Suleyman, a Syrian Catholic, had withdrawn from the government (he’d never trusted him), nor that Oskan, a damned Armenian, had resigned (he was an intruder here), but when he read that his childhood friend, the righteous Mahmud Pasha, had also left the government, he muttered to himself: ‘This looks mighty bad.’ Still, he continued to hope without foundation that the trumpets of war would bypass the Golden Horn and his righteous and stern Padishah.
But then he raised his eyes from the newspaper, and what he saw numbed him. No one knew that Yıldız Effendi played a little game every day, just for himself, like when Westerners open a game of patience. That day too, the orange and red spices were competing on sale against the yellowish, green and brown ones. A victory of the former was a bad sign and a victory of the latter a good one for that day, but the battle was always closely fought and only the experienced eye of the trader could tell which spices carried the day and how he, following those signs, would act until evening prayer. Now he folded Tanin together and his jaw dropped. He wasn’t even able to utter his ‘This looks mighty bad’, because he saw the signs of impending misfortune in all their blatancy. For the trader in oriental spices Mehmed Yıldız, the Great War began when he realized that the red and vermillion spices were outselling the others by such an overwhelming margin on 28 October 1914 that his boys were already glancing his way, mutely calling on their master to replenish the stocks from the large storeroom beneath the bridge, to which he alone had a key.
The next day, 29 October, Turkey entered the Great War. Those half medieval, half modern people celebrated in the streets on the opposite side of the Golden Horn. The coachmen took passengers to all three parts of the city for free. No toll was charged on the bridge that day. One beardless lad even jumped off Galata Tower with improvised, wax-coated wings and tried to fly like a moth over the windy Bosporus, but he crashed into the ground and died of his injuries the same evening.
Just one week after the red spices had won a crushing victory over the browns in Istanbul, another beardless lad by the name of Tibor Németh was to be the first Austro-Hungarian soldier to enter evacuated Belgrade. After the Serbian defeats on the Rivers Drina and Sava, an acute shortage of ammunition had forced the Serbian command to order the army’s withdrawal to reserve positions along the line Varovnica–Kosmay–Rudnik–Gornyi Milanovac–Ovchar–Kablar Gorge. So the army withdrew from cities like Shabac, Valyevo, Uzhice and even Belgrade. The last train to set off south for Nish with refugees, who had returned to the capital for their winter clothing, left from the main platform of the station with a whistle on 26 October by the old calendar, or 8 November by the new.
‘It’s not my fault!’ General Zhivoyin Mishich thundered into the receiver of the field telephone. ‘What can I do if my men are exhausted and the capital is located on the border where there should only be a customs post?’
And so Belgrade was evacuated. The first Austro-Hungarian scouts crossed the Danube into the city in silence. When this advance party set off cautiously towards the low-lying quarters of the city, they were met only by starving bitches with protruding ribs and shrivelled teats hanging between their legs. The reconnaissance battalion had the task of going from house to house and checking if any defenders remained in the deserted flats; if so, they were to be killed immediately. Németh’s comrades shouted ‘All clear’. And he thought it was too, at first. But when he entered a commercial building in Dubrovnik Street, someone fired a shot at him. Private Németh couldn’t tell who it was. He thought he saw a man with long sideburns and a kippah in the reception room of that building, but it wasn’t really a man but a phantasm, half real and half transparent, through which he could see the bergère from where the shot was fired.
The bullet was certainly real enough. It whistled past his ear and made a hole in the wall above his head, but when Németh thrust his bayonet at the illusion of the Jewish trader he only impaled the empty bergère, which spilt its hemp stuffing at his feet like bowels and threw out springs like bones. The proud soldier didn’t know what to think, but he wasn’t afraid. He continued to comb the streets of Belgrade, while all around him more and more ghosts were abroad. They flitted across the streets like shadows, and many were watching him, pressed up against the small Turkish windows. In Yovanova Street two small boys, their bodies transparent like the Jew’s had been, ran past him and hit him without warning, one on each side. He felt a pain and fired a few shots, but the bullets passed right through the boys, and he started running after them. He didn’t know why. He should just have shouted ‘All clear’ and let them bolt off like mountain goats, but his perseverance was to be the end of him — his fatal error. The boys passed from courtyard to courtyard, jumping fences and ditches. From Yovanova Street they crossed to Yevremova Street, and then suddenly turned and ran through the park and on towards King Peter Street. He looked into that deserted, grand avenue: tall buildings loomed on both sides of the street and seemed to be leaning inwards, towards him, as if conspiring to collapse on top of him. But the proud Hungarian soldier wasn’t afraid now either. Where had those little brats got to? Finally he spotted them again, just before they disappeared into a strange building, its facade tiled with green majolica.
He dashed after them