PROLOGUE: TWO REVOLVER SHOTS

The Great War began for Dr Mehmed Graho when he was least expecting it, just when he was told that ‘two important bodies’ would be brought to the mortuary in that June heatwave. But for Dr Graho, hunched and ageing but still hale, with a bald head and prominent flat pate, no bodies were more important than others. All the corpses which came under his knife were waxy pale, with cadaverously gaping mouths, often with eyes which no one had had time to close, or had not dared to, which now bulged and stared away into space, striving with their lifeless pupils to catch one last ray of sun.

But that did not disturb him. Ever since 1874, he had placed his round glasses on his nose, donned his white coat, put on long gloves and begun his work at the Sarajevo mortuary, where he removed hearts from within chests, felt broken ribs for signs of police torture and searched the stomachs of the deceased for swallowed fish bones and the remains of the last meal.

Now the ‘important bodies’ arrived, and the pathologist still hadn’t heard what had happened out in the streets. He didn’t know that the Archduke’s car had been backing out of Franz Joseph Street and that there, from out of the crowd on the corner near the Croatia Insurance building, a little fellow had fired two revolver shots at the heir to the Austrian throne and the Duchess of Hohenberg. At first, the bodyguards thought the royal couple was unharmed and it looked as if the Archduke had only turned and glanced away in the other direction, to the assembled crowd; the Duchess resembled a doll in a Vienna shop window, and a moment later blood gushed from her noble breast; Franz Ferdinand’s mouth also filled with blood, which trickled down the right-hand side of his orderly, black-dyed moustache. Only a little later was it established that the important persons had been hit, and within fifteen minutes the male of the couple had become an ‘important body’. Half an hour after that, the important female person hadn’t awoken from her state of unconsciousness, lying in the umbrage of the Governor’s residence, and she too was declared an ‘important body’.

Now the two important bodies had arrived, and no one had told Dr Graho who they were. But one glance at the male corpse’s uniform with its breast full of medals and one look at the long, trailing, silk dress of the female body told him who had come under his scalpel. When he had undressed them and washed their wounds he was told not to extract the bullets from their bodies but just to mix a plaster slurry and make casts of their faces. That is probably why he didn’t notice that the Archduke had a small malignant tumour in the oral cavity and that something had been killed together with the lady which could have been a foetus in her womb.

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 s