As a cheap scribbler in the big city, who just yesterday was writing about fires in the buildings of Buda and the chamber pots which some city folk still emptied out of the windows on the heads of passers-by, what could he now do but believe that the exhortation of the jingoistic crowd in the pub put him under some kind of obligation. But to do what? a few days later, the editor gave him a new assignment which struck him as journalistic providence: all the junior staff of the Pester Lloyd who didn’t have columns of their own — which included young Veres — were given the daily task of writing and sending threatening letters to the Serbian court.
A seemingly futile job; yet not for he who until recently had been reporting on the measles epidemic in the gypsy ghetto on Margaret Island. The new task demanded loyalty and patriotism, but above all a style of writing adaptable to lampooning. And Veres put his mind to it. He was loyal, and resolute in the extreme. He himself came to believe he was a Hungarian of Israelite faith, with a heightened sense of patriotism. And his style — he had no doubt he’d make the grade. The first letter addressed to H.R.H. Alexander, heir to the Serbian throne, turned out beautifully. Tibor had the impression not of writing it, but of shouting directly at that impertinent prince who had kindled a fire beneath old, civilized Europe. Two sentences in particular were to stick fondly in his memory: ‘Stupid swine, you can’t even wallow in your own pen,’ and ‘Son of a polecat, you’ve fouled your own den with your vile stench’.
When the Serbian press, which he continued to monitor, reported that hundreds of absurd, abusive letters from Pest and Vienna were arriving at the court in Hungarian and German every day, full of the vilest insults to Crown prince Alexander and old King Peter, Veres took that as encouragement to carry on even more resolutely (the editor himself even read one lampoon and told him something like ‘you’ll make a good capital-city journalist’). But then something strange happened to him, like it did to the pathologist Dr Graho, albeit nothing with quite such Gothic portent as at the Sarajevo mortuary. Tibor simply started to lose control of his words. He couldn’t say how it came about.
He began every new letter with an extremely insulting form of address. He’d think up a very impudent characterization of the Serbian king and Serbia as a nation, then develop the idea like a good journalist does, finding shameful examples in history, and in the end embellish it all with thinly veiled threats. When Tibor wanted to show one such letter to the editor and fortunately decided to reread it first, he was greatly surprised. The words he had written seemed to have played games on him, right there on the paper. It was a real free-for-all, a grammatical kingdom without a king. Nouns stole each other’s meanings, nor did verbs stay aloof; adjectives and adverbs were right little bandits and contrabandists, like real-life pirates who smuggle booty and slaves. Only numbers and prepositions were partly immune to this supercilious game, the result of which was that everything he wrote ultimately resembled praise of the Serbian Crown prince, rather than an insult to him.
At first, he tried to rewrite the letter, but then he realized it was quite stupid to try and rephrase a panegyric of Serbia when he had actually wanted to write the complete opposite. He decided to change language and switched from Hungarian to German. He dredged up heavy German words from his memory; vocabulary with lumps and bumps and excrescences — words blind and deaf to morality and any vestige of self-consciousness. From this syntactic rubble, picked up off the streets and slapped together with petulant jargon, our little Budapest chronicler would again compose a letter, and once more it seemed quite beautiful, if that can be said of lampoons; but as soon as he had finished, it began to change its meaning before his very eyes and impudently polish itself up. Gering (trivial) simply switched to gerecht (rightful), and when he wanted to write ‘Das war ein dummes Ding’ (that was stupid) it turned out his hand had written ‘Jedes Ding hat zwei Seiten’ (everything has two sides) as if he wanted to enter a debate with the impertinent prince rather than defame him. And so it continued. Words which had smacked of devilry and human excretions now seemed to have bathed and doused themselves with perfume. A profanity became an ordinary little reproach, and a reproach morphed into words of acclaim.
He thought this might be because he was writing on thin, journalists’ onion-skin paper, so he asked the editor for some thicker stuff. He also changed his fountain pen and swapped blue for black ink, before he was finally relieved of his torment. His hate mail now remained as he intended: a devastating storm with hailstones the size of eggs. The editor liked his letters too, and Tibor thought the secret lay in the paper, pen and black ink. He even felt like kissing his mischievous pen, with which he had gone on to write a whole host of shameless letters to the Serbian court during the summer of 1914. But he didn’t know what was happening in the mail.
The sordid letters now realized that they shouldn’t change before the eyes of their bloated, sleep-deprived creator; instead, they resolved to change their meaning in the postbox or the luggage van of the Austro-Hungarian mail service, which carried letters all over Europe, including to Serbia. One journalist thus saved his job shortly before mobilization began, and the Serbian court was surprised that among the hundreds of lampoons from Pest there was also the occasional eulogy, and they mistakenly took this as a sign that some common sense still existed in Austria-Hungary.
The Serbian press continued to make a brouhaha and to bandy around insulting language itself, except that the words didn’t change in any of the papers in Serbia, and no such glitch ever went to press to skew the meaning of a sentence. Tibor continued to write with his black ink on the new, thicker paper and to monitor the Serbian newspapers. But he only browsed through the first few pages. The advertisements and announcements were of no interest to him, and yet it was precisely these which led to ‘an incident’ in Belgrade, as Politika called it. It all began with a little advertisement which Tibor didn’t read. For Djoka Velkovich, a small dealer in shoe polish, the Great War began when he placed a framed advertisement in Politika: “Buy German Idealin shoe polish! Real Idealin, with the shoe on the tin, is made of pure tallow and preserves the leather of your shoes.” At the foot of the ad, so as to fill up all the space he had paid for, he added a phrase which would later prove fatal for him: “Beware of imitations for the sake of your footwear.”
The ad was printed on the fourth page of Politika on the day the front pages wrote “Austria sticks to its blinkered position”, “The Times varies with Austrian and Pest press” and “Scoop: the assassins Princip and Chabrinovich were Austro-Hungarian citizens”, but the small dealer in imported shoe polish didn’t read the headlines. Gavra Crnogorchevich, a shoemaker, didn’t see the front pages either, but he did note the ad and the phrase “Beware of imitations for the sake of your footwear”. It seems Gavra had a bone to pick with Djoka. Once they had both been cobbler’s assistants, and people say they even shared a courtyard house belonging to Miya Chikanovich, a nineteenth-century wholesale and retail dealer. Whether shoemaker Crnogorchevich decided to sabotage Velkovich’s shoe-polish business out of envy, or due to some old, unsettled accounts, is not known.
They say that Crnogorchevich boasted to his boozy mates in the café Moruna that he hated everything German, especially when it was to do with his trade, and that he didn’t see why Serbia should import shoe polish and call it Idealin when Serbs could mix tallow and black dye themselves and make a better polish than anything ‘the Krauts’ could come up with. It was probably this grandstanding in the café — with a refrain very similar to the one which inspired a little journalist in Pest and which the crowd repeated like a salvo: ‘Everything of ours is better than the Krauts’!’ — which prompted the shoemaker to begin producing an imitation of Idealin himself. All he needed was domestic tallow, locally produced dye, a tradesman from Vrchin to make the tins, a shady workman to cast the die for an embossing machine like the one which impressed the design of the hand holding a shoe and the German slogan, ‘ist die beste Idealin’ — and the fake shoe polish came onto the market.
Both versions sold in the grocery stores, so Velkovich and Crnogorchevich’s paths didn’t cross at first. But Belgrade was too small a town for this ‘Idealin coexistence’ to last for long. Velkovich