Just put the plaster on their faces and take their masks. And that he did, while shouts out the front of the mortuary mingled with the warm summer wind from the River Milyacka and the distant sound of sobbing. Just a little further away, in the street, a crowd set off to lynch the assassins. Discarded weapons were found beneath the Latin Bridge. In the panic, informants spread various rumours, mixed with copious perversion and lies, while Dr Graho stirred the plaster dust and water in his metal basin to make sure the mixture wouldn’t start to set before he applied it to the faces.
First of all, he covered the noblewoman’s rounded forehead with the crease in the middle, then her slightly stubby nose with flaring nostrils. He filled the nasal cavity well, spread plaster between the eyelashes and carefully, like an artist, shaped the eyebrows, applying the paste almost lovingly to every hair. This was fitting preparation for the Archduke’s countenance and his black, handlebar moustache, which had to be faithfully preserved for posterity and the many bronze castings which — so he imagined — would grace every institution of the Dual Monarchy for decades to come. Was he afraid? Did his nerves show? Did he perhaps feel a little like a demiurge, crafting the posthumous image of what until just half an hour ago was Austria-Hungary’s most powerful to-be? Not at all. Dr Graho was one of those people with no loose thoughts buzzing around in their head. He didn’t daydream, nor was he plagued by nightmares. The souls of the dead from his day’s work didn’t haunt him when he closed his eyes at night. If it were otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to become Sarajevo’s main pathologist in 1874 and receive deceased Turks and the dead of all three faiths day in, day out.
Nor did his hand tremble now. He modelled the plaster beneath the heir apparent’s lower lip, painstakingly shaped the dimple in his clean-shaven chin, covered his eyelids and attentively devoted himself to the moustache. First of all, he removed the tallow which gave it body and then did his very best to ensure that every black moustache hair was given its coat of plaster. When he had finished, two limp, completely naked bodies with white face-masks lay side by side beneath his hands. Now he had only to wait; but then something strange happened.
First one word, then another.
Had someone perhaps come into the mortuary? One of his assistants, or a policeman? He turned around, but there was no one nearby, and the words were coalescing into a whisper. What language was it? At first, he thought it seemed a mixture of many languages: Turkish, Serbian, German and Hungarian, all of which he knew, but they were intermingled with others — Asian, he thought, African, and extinct ones like Aramaic or Hazaragi. But no, he must be fooling himself. This doctor, who never dreamed, sat down quietly on the chair; still unmoved by fright. He looked at the bodies to ensure they weren’t moving; yet even if by some chance they did, it wouldn’t have surprised him either. When the anima leaves, the body can go wild and twitch in a frenzy. He had seen this back in 1899, when one poor wretch kicked and shuddered almost a whole day after death, as if he had electricity running through him, and very nearly fell from the dissection table. Or take the woman, perhaps in 1904 or — that was it — 1905, who seemed to breathe all evening. Her beautiful, youthful breasts, which no child had suckled, rose and fell evenly before the eyes of Dr Graho, as if her dead mouth still drew breath; but it was all a trick of the eye and the doctor later documented the case in a well-received article for a Vienna medical journal.
The Archduke and Duchess could even have embraced and it wouldn’t have surprised him. But they were speaking . . . the words wrested themselves from regional idioms and made their way to him articulately and clearly all in German. He tried to tell where the whisper was coming from and quickly established that it was the mouths beneath the plaster masks which were articulating them. Now he was alarmed. This was far from physiologically predictable and would hardly go towards a convincing lecture before the Imperial Society of Pathologists. Franz Ferdinand and his Duchess were speaking to each other. Dr Graho leaned his ear right up to Franz Ferdinand’s mouth, and from beneath the plaster mask he heard one muffled but still discernible word:
‘Darling?’
‘Yes, my dear?’ immediately came the reply from the Duchess.
‘Do you see these lands, this forest, whose leaves grow and fall as fast as if the years flew by like minutes?’
In reply, there followed only the Duchess’s: ‘Are you in pain?’
‘A little,’ the important male body answered. ‘And you?’
‘No, darling, but there’s something firm over my mouth, and it’s not the clay of the grave.’
Mehmed Graho recoiled. The plaster casts hadn’t yet set on the faces of the royal couple, but at hearing the Duchess’s words he set about removing them with trembling hands. He was fortunate that the plaster didn’t break because that would certainly have cost him the position he had quietly held ever since Ottoman times. With the two, mercifully intact death-masks in his hands, he looked at the splotchy faces of the wax-pale figures on his table. The lips were moving, he could swear to it now.
‘I’m naked,’ said the male body.
‘I’m ashamed. You know I’ve never ever been nude before you,‘ the woman replied.
‘But now we’re going.’
‘Where?’
‘Away.’
‘What will we leave behind?’
‘Grief, a void, our dreams and all our pitiable plans.’
‘What will happen?’
‘There will be war, the great war we’ve been preparing for.’
‘But without us?’
‘Actually, because of us . . . ’
At that moment, a man dashed into the mortuary. He addressed Dr Graho in Turkish:
‘Doctor, have you finished? Just in time! The new uniforms are here.’ He continued in German: ‘My God, how terrible it is to see them naked, and their faces messy with plaster. Wash them quickly now. The court delegation will be arriving any minute. The bodies need to be embalmed and taken by express train to Metkovich harbour, from there to be shipped to Trieste. Come on, doctor, snap out of it! It’s not as if they’re the first dead bodies you’ve seen. Once they’ve stopped breathing, the Archduke and Duchess are just bodies like any others.’
But the voices, and the war, the great war . . . Dr Graho was about to ask . . . but he didn’t say a word. Dead mouths don’t speak after all, he thought, as he handed the plaster casts to the stranger, without knowing if he was a policeman, secret agent, soldier, provocateur, or even one of the assassins. Afterwards everything went the usual mortuary way. The bodies were dressed, a new coat was quickly put on over the Archduke’s breast, new, imitation medals were attached in place of the old, bloodied and bent ones, a new gown almost identical to the silk one in pale apricot was slipped on over the Countess’s chest (no one thought of underwear now), and an evening came on just like any other, with that gentle breeze in the valley which cools Sarajevo even in summer.
Dr Graho was on duty in the days that followed. None of the bodies on his table moved and none of them said a word, but 850 km to the north-west the entire Austrian press was firing verbal salvos at the Serbian government and Prime Minister Nikola Pashich, whom German-speaking journalists had always despised. The reporter, Tibor Veres, worked for the Budapest daily Pester Lloyd, whose editorial office was housed in a dark, altogether diabolical building on the Pest side of the city, right by the Danube. Veres was an ethnic Hungarian from the border province of Bachka, and since he had a knowledge of Serbian he was entrusted with monitoring the Serbian newspapers. The Great War began for Veres when he read in one of papers: “Vienna, where diligent Serbian businessmen have invested for years, is becoming a bandits’ den, and the slander of Austro-Jewish journalists more and more resembles the baying of dogs.”