1. Ernest toured the world as a conductor, as junior partner to (Sir) Thomas Beecham—alongside Leonard Bernstein, the greatest musical talents of their age. From Covent Garden to the Café de Paris, they turned the stale, staid world of music on its head. A self-taught master of music, Beecham had been the first in the British Isles to perform Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Strauss’s Elektra, and the magical, mythical Salome. Beecham was the iconoclast. With a stashed family fortune from the production of laxative pills and cure-alls, he had formed the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the summer of 1932 in Covent Garden. In the ensuing years, Ernest had understudied the genius of Beecham, who later in ’47 established the mighty Royal Philharmonic. Together, in their rebellious early days, they had championed English music, particularly that of Frederick Delius, whom they brought to Covent Garden society. Sibelius and Handel had been other favorites, played in wonderfully personal and very inventive arrangements to stunned audiences. They were instinctive and enthusiastic. Their productions of Bizet’s Carmen were legendary.
It was Beecham who had once famously said that “the English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.” His remarks and witticisms became the center of much fun and interest within society. At an event for the well-to-do, he found himself chatting with a lady whom he was sure he recognized.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m very well, thank you, Sir Thomas, although my brother has not been well of late.”
“Oh yes. Your brother. Is he still doing the same job?”
“Oooh yes, he is still the King.”
Beecham and Ernest eventually went their separate ways professionally but remained firm friends for the rest of their days. (Ernest had met his wife, Betty, at this point. From a family of moneyed Cape Town piano dealers, Betty was also a member of the South African tennis team, a more than proficient show jumper, and a bright young bureau chief for the London Daily Mail in Africa. Thankfully for me, off they went to make babies—three, to be exact. (Now all sadly scythed down by booze.) With his mentor, Beecham, Ernest left a legacy of musical revolution. The landscape would never look the same again. The old guard and the establishment had been left cowering, muttering their disbelief behind their evening programs.
On his deathbed, Beecham reckoned that the best advice he could offer to anyone was, “Try everything once, except incest and folk dancing.”
2. Idi u kurac: Literally, “Go inside the cock.” Less literally, “You are a fucker.”
3. Tizi pizdun: “You are a pussy.”
4. Merkin: a pubic wig.
5. Quotation by Jean Rostand.
6. The royal visit: The Austro-Hungarian Empire (aka The Hapsburg Empire) constituted a powerhouse in Europe, akin to the British throne. Geographically, the area it covered was immense. In the time of Charles V, it had stretched from Castile and Aragon to pockets of the Netherlands, Sardinia, Sicily, and Italy, south of Naples. The main landmass included modern-day Austria, Hungary, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Bosnia.
From the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century, the Hapsburgs were central to European politics and power.
Although harshly referred to as a “prison of nations,” their empire offered a shelter to far-flung regions to protect against stronger, local cultures. As the landscape of Europe shifted and entered the industrial age, the Hapsburgs, however, did not evolve.
Nestled next to and, crucially, upon the powder keg of the Balkans, the empire was despised by the fiercely nationalistic and expansionist Serbs. They saw the Hapsburgs as occupiers of land which had once constituted Greater Serbia. Key to this dispute was the province of Bosnia.
The dream of Greater Serbia was to include the lands of Kosovo, Herzegovina, Vojvodina, Bosnia, Serb Krajina, Macedonia, and of course Serbia itself. Ever since the region was freed from Turkish slavery and the Ottoman Empire, this had been the goal of the typical Serb. The Serbs desired a seaport for the landlocked homeland. It would be hard to find tougher, more ruthless people, and if there was ever an equally psychotic bunch of villains and gun-toting, ax-wielding homicidal, wild-eyed genocidal lunatics, it was their neighboring foe, the Croats. The third ethnic group in the region, the Muslims (there as the result of ancient Byzantine expansionism), were held in equal disdain by both.
The Serbs and their historical brethren of Russia were set against the Croats and their friends in Germany, creating a microcosm of the struggles within a wider Europe. “Ethnically Serb, territorially Serbia” was their aim.
7. Marigold is believed to be the most useful and multifunctional of all plants. Yet, like other weeds which have been adopted into cultivated gardens by horticulturists, the marigold is so aesthetically pleasing that its practical uses and beneficial properties have become largely ignored.
Its healing properties were once legendary across the Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula to Mesopotamia. It contains querticin 3-0-glucoside for cuts and bruises, volatile oils for antiseptics, and salisylic acids for external anti-inflammatories. When taken internally, it relieves headaches and extreme nervous conditions. It heals warts and relieves fever. Marigold leaves cure scrofula (a form of TB of the bones and lymph glands) in children. Delayed menstruation, heart murmurs, and skin diseases yield to the marigold. Bad circulation, varicose veins, chilblains, eczema, measles, and digestive disorders, too.
The fabulous weed is a styptic, which means it can stem bleeding by forcing tissue to contract. It was first used in this way in the American Civil War by nurses and medics, and later in the Great War. Indeed, as Johan was picking the flower, the famous English gardener of the day, Gertrude Jekyll, was only months away from having to send millions of bushels from her Sussex estate to the field hospitals in France and Belgium, where they were to be used for dressings.
8. While the old bells of Shrewsbury Church sounded out the news of the armistice, a crooked and elderly Mrs. Owen noticed that a telegram had just landed on her front doormat. It took her a minute or two to reach it as she wiped her ancient-looking hands on her fastidiously clean apron, then another to find a knife to cut open the correspondence. The telegram told her of the news of the death of her only son, Wilfred, just four days before, in Belgium.
9. Henslow was from John Henslow, the Cambridge professor, who had given up his place on the Beagle to a spiky fellow by the name of Darwin.
10. Decias que no y hasta la trompita alzabas: “You say you don’t want to, but your lips are pursed.”
11. Binoculars had officially been banned to the public by the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act. The act (DORA to her friends) was responsible for a whole range of freedom-limiting moves, including England’s somewhat archaic licensing laws.
12. The Croat militia, the Ustase (literally “insurgent”), had taken control of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and were allies of Hitler. Even though the Croats were seen as substandard to the Aryan model, this was a convenient geographical bedfellowship for Berlin. A conservative estimate of lives lost in the concentration camps, such as Jasenovac, Gospić, and Pag, was one million. Six more noughts for the total. The Ustase had traditionally had close links to the Catholic Church. The Ustase leader, Anten Pavelić, was actually smuggled to Argentina after the war disguised as a Catholic priest through a network which became known as the “rat channels.” Pavelić had been famous for always having in his presence a basketful of Serbian eyeballs. The Ustase had been brutally cleansing the countryside of Jews, Romany Gypsies, and Serbs. Muslims were often, however, bizarrely included in the Ustase, regarded as Croats of the Muslim faith, even having their own mosques in Zagreb and Split. No doubt more than a few of the militia would have been exposed to more than one Catholic priest with dubious, yogurty activities on a hot sticky Sunday evening by the sea in Dubrovnik or in the privacy of a rainy Wednesday afternoon in a cloister in the suburbs of Mostar. Their vengeful anger toward sodomites would have had known no bounds as far as the poor old Count was concerned.
13. The Balkan bloodbath of the 1990s was started, arguably, by the Germans, at the behest of the Croats. After Tito’s death, out of Yugoslavia’s old racial tensions and hatred rose the ugliest head of all. Europe and Brussels were desperately trying to push through the Maastricht Treaty on European unity. The Germans had the power of veto and wished to see their business interests and their cousins thrive free of Serb interference in a land free now of communism. A free market was going to mean cold hard cash. The Germans agreed to sign the treaty on the proviso that their Croat cousins were granted autonomy by Europe and independence from the rest of Yugoslavia. Brussels relented, keen to realize its own bureaucratic goals, myopic to, and probably not even giving a distant damn about, the powder keg, into which it was throwing a lit match. Another round of genocide ensued—Srebnenica, Milošević, Tudjman—and the only thing we learn from history is our bloody-minded refusal never, ever to learn anything from it. Sarajevo was to rightly re-earn its tag as the Lebanon of the Balkans, repeatedly the innocent and unwitting venue for someone else’s fight.
14. Non que non tronabas pistolita: No literal translation; “bit by bit, one can explode a mountain with a small pistol.” The suggestion is that if one perserveres, one can do absolutely anything, despite the odds.
15. Fibonacci sequence: There are infinite numbers of Fibonacci sequences where the next number is the sum of the two previous ones. It is a common misapprehension that there is one: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 . . . Any procession of numbers may display the sequence’s properties—5, 7, 12, 19, 31, 50 . . . Or 3, 90, 93, 183, 276 . . . Johan was fascinated by this, as he saw the parallel in his taking the blame for an event for which many should equally be fingered.
16. Bertolt Brecht, from Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui). The word aufhaltsame is not used in German. Unaufhaltsame is “irresistible,” and the fact that Brecht used aufhaltsame merely underlines his belief that it had been possible to prevent Hitler’s rise to power.
17. When in the future (1992) evil returned, the rest of the world turned its negligent, mean-spirited, and ruthless back on Bosnia. Blanchita then found her father’s olive-green fatigues from 1937 and joined the fight. Her pianist’s hands helped to dig the famous tunnel which seams below the landing strip of the international airport to this day. For three years, the single underground track offered the only way of delivering water, electricity, and food to the besieged citizens and when the burrowing was finished, she continued to work with the men at great personal risk from the shells bombarding the innocent citadel. When the shelling eventually stopped, she quickly reprised her roles of teacher, pianist, and chess assassin. Johan’s guilt from the past and concern for her present were outweighed by his vast now-paternal pride, but only just. On Johan’s hundredth birthday, the irony was not lost on him that his beloved Sarajevo was under siege from malice, and that it was the generous and spirited flesh and blood of Cicero that had tunneled a lifeline to it.
18. Quotation by Mahatma Gandhi.