The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

And here were these wonderful women in starched white who would give love and comfort to those with little love and no comfort. He presumed that there were just enough of these generous girls, spread around the globe the right distance apart, that he would never be alone with his pain and would always be clean, surrounded by caring faces and by loving hands, which would put him back together again. The scattering of these angels meant that everywhere had just enough and they were not in excess or shortfall in any one location. The pieces of life’s jigsaw seemed to fall into place, so well designed that there could not possibly be a God who could be doing this. It was just too big a job.

He considered infinity in the other direction, to the smallest particle. If x was an atom, y, cosmic vastness, and z, time, it was just too much. It was miraculous in its nature, in its randomness, in its nondesign. Just one huge coincidence that all seemed to work. From the nurses and their love, he extrapolated a theory that explained everything. It was naive and juvenile (he was just a small boy), but also incredibly neat and real.

The Universe (and everything in it) had been arrived at simply by a series of coincidences—good luck and bad luck, and nothing more. He was convinced of what Caesar had once suspected: that the skies had endured for whatever reason, but that his own future was yet to be determined. His path was in the palm of his own hand. Johan gave God zero credit for life’s canvas and no credit for the oils, which he dreamed of using sometimes liberally, sometimes sparingly, to create a busy yet beautifully arced masterpiece. He would attempt to be measured in his decisions, for he knew that statistics would always be lurking, and would likely kick the fool in the shins. So, having thanked coincidence for delivering him to his current coordinates, Johan would now aim, within the parameters of reason, mathematics, and statistics, to be the Caesar of his own fortunes.

He pondered that he had used up so much of his good luck in surviving a bladed antler in the skull that, if he were to ever again have such a close scrape with death, he would have to run and run and run. He imagined it to be the equivalent of having used up eight feline lives in a single incident. Right now, though, he was grateful to be alive, for he knew that there was no one waiting for him on the other side of that white light.

And so Johan Thoms became Europe’s youngest atheist.

“Does all that God nonsense make sense to you, Dad?” he groggily asked Drago.

“I know, son. It’s like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there, but still finding the thing!”

Johan explained his theory of the Universe, which he had dubbed the Immoral Highground, to his father. Drago was proud.

Four

The Butterflies Flutter By

Happiness is like a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

My schooldays! The silent gliding on of my existence, the unseen, unfelt progress of my life, from childhood up to youth. Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran.”

“David Copperfield?” Ernest asked.

“But of course. Who else?”

* * *

September 1901. Argona.

For a few weeks, Johan lived out the role of minor local celebrity. The bandages came off layer by layer, ultimately revealing a rather normal, if not very lucky, stitched-up young boy. After the interminable summer holiday, he returned to school.

Clusters of children flocked reluctantly to the crumbling schoolyard each morning—less like bees to honey, and more like a hefty trawl of kicking fish. Their uniform khaki trousers and steel-gray shirts sensibly replaced the bleached white of the spring term. With the gray shirts came the unmistakable September nip in the air, and the butterfly nerves of the new term.

Johan had to endure a barrage of teasing about his talking to animals rather than the respect he might have thought he deserved for cheating death, saving the hospital, and becoming friends with European royalty all in one fell swoop.

He would tag along with groups of other boys in the local park, invariably in their wake. The comforting ringing of sublime church bells nearby was enough to send Johan into a deep trance. By the time he would come around, he would find his supposed friends a distant memory, just a small puff of dust where they had stood. He would hear the distant echo of muffled laughter disappearing into the labyrinth of back alleys before he wandered off by himself, seemingly untroubled but still breathing too fast for his own good.

In his solitary walks, he got to know the town by heart. He became a flâneur. Argona was an archaic wonderland, and a safe place in which to grow up. Even the stray dogs bounced around worry-free. Side streets and alleyways, where the bells squeezed and resonated, were wedged between buildings which looked as if they had been there forever. The gargoyles, which seemed to have come straight from a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, glared and spewed not just from towers and eaves, but on door knockers, too, and were carved into the white stone itself. Though supernatural, they lacked any sort of actual threat. Even the abundant ghost stories carried no horror, nor bore any malice.

Argona’s centerpiece was a church dating back to the fourteenth century. Although the cloisters had been destroyed by fire (allegedly during an almighty scrap between God and Lucifer in the fifteenth century), the church had made Argona an important trading center, and it remained a magnificent structure. The rest of the town’s architecture slipstreamed in its former glory.

Old men, when they were not riding through town on trusty, rusty bikes, waited for the last train in faded suits with small trunks. Others sat on the benches around town, considering the club of other old guys doing the same for thousands of miles in every direction. They sat alone, or with a contemporary or a grandson, to whom they repeated exaggerated tales.

In the mornings, the smell of the town’s two bakeries pervaded avenue and nostril. The smells of the late afternoon were of steaming vegetables, infused with roasting meats and paprika from open windows. The Pavlovian clink of cutlery made the children’s mouths water.

The long Argona days gave way to nights of dimly lit taverns, couples kissing in the alleys, and wet cobblestones, to be steamed dry by the morning sun. There was none of the danger of the big city, and if that left the locals a bit naive, then they were more than a little happy. There was an honesty and refreshing plainness to the people, and pretentions were spotted sooner than a degenerate, hungover Austrian count with his fly down.

February 12, 1907

It was his thirteenth birthday, and in the morning he had been playing chess against himself, thinking of talking to deer real or imaginary, and pressing his nose into English literature. Yet he had been unable to fully relax.

He spent his birthday afternoon on his language homework, a thousand words on any subject he chose. He was racking his brains for inspiration, and repeatedly kicking his ball around the garden, when two turquoise butterflies playing tag flew past his nose. He went inside, picked up a pen, and began to write.

One amazingly beautiful creature, many different, unrelated names in different languages, words, all equally charming in their ability to describe it, and all so VERY different.

Mariposa, papillon, butterfly, Schmetterling, borboleta, farfalla, babochka, kupu kupu . . .

The butterfly may well be unique in this characteristic on the planet—not just in the animal kingdom, but in the sphere of the spoken word, Johan Thoms said to himself. He said many things to himself, for his father had taken him to one side as a boy, and with a seriousness Johan could measure in his mind, told him that the man who shows off his intelligence without justification is the same braggard who boasts of the size of his prison cell.

A trawl of Johan’s university library years later would reveal that of the four hundred languages sourced there, no two words for “butterfly” bore any resemblance to each other, not even in such close cousins as Spanish and Portuguese.

“The only commonality is in repeated syllables, meant perhaps to display the symmetry of that fine creature. In Ethiopian, he is the birra birro, in Japanese, the chou chou, and among the Aborigines either the buuja buuja, the malimali, or the man man.” (A very young Johan Thoms made this observation way before a certain Mr. Rorschach thought about boring us rigid with his diagram.)

Johan noted, too, that butterflies always seemed to be around whenever he thought of them. He entitled the essay “The Butterflies Flutter By.”

He was a weird little lad. And, without doubt, a time bomb.

Part Two

Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid.

—William Cowper

One

Fools Rush In

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.

—Boswell’s Life of Johnson

September 1912

Johan Thoms packed up his books in Argona. At the age of eighteen, he had been accepted at the University of Sarajevo with the help of a scholarship—a major shaking of the kaleidoscope for young Johan, one might think, but not really. In Sarajevo he was only an hour from his childhood comforts, and he went rushing forward into dusty libraries while clinging to the past, returning at every opportunity to the Womb of Argona (a phrase he also used jokingly to refer to his mother). His determination to enjoy the present seemed to be dogged by his worry about the future and, more specifically, his desire to please his parents. He tried repeatedly to remind himself of his own theory of the Universe, and to live in the present. He tried to tell himself that what was done was done, that what will be was within his own control, and that there was no God to punish him for present, past, or future deeds. Within these seconds, he found peace of mind. However, it would take only somewhere between a fragment of a conversation and the distraction of a passing sparrow to lead his mind astray, and he would have broken his calming promise to himself.

* * *

Chess and soccer finally conceded to books.

Johan’s love of literature had been grounded in summer afternoons in the school glen reading Dickens with his favorite teacher, upon whom he had developed a crush at the age of ten. The class dissected English classics under the apple blossom trees, which in spring were whiter than the students’ bleach-white shirts. Johan was then rarely seen without a scabby novel or a yellowing library newspaper. Often he disagreed fiercely with what he read. When something made sense, he would slowly close his tome, his thumb keeping his spot, and ponder the newly found truth.

In his university years, he adopted the same technique for things with which he did not concur. Finally, differing opinions received more of his attention than those confirming his own often-stubborn beliefs. (Conversely, history professors claim that Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler read only books with which they already agreed, giving them an even more distorted vision of the world.)

Johan also stumbled upon a method of recording every required academic (and nonacademic) detail to memory. When his brain could take no more, he would stuff his face with vegetables, seeds, and legumes, pass a massive stool, and by this vacuum, create room for new knowledge. His theory was given extra weight when, at the age of nineteen, he read that Martin Luther had invented the Protestant religion while facilitating an extremely satisfying evacuation of his bowels. When he read The Hound of the Baskervilles, he was stunned to discover that Sherlock Holmes himself noted (on the subject of his Baker Street flat being thick with tobacco smoke), “I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.”

Johan took three seconds out of his life to imagine the fictional English demigod in a tiny fictional WC, a fictional shadow cast by his deerstalker hat, worn at forty-five degrees for the fictional duration of his ponderings.

Johan snapped back to reality as the word deerstalker scuttled through his brain. For what was he himself if not an erstwhile deerstalker? He wondered where his old pal Deer was now, and then asked himself if he thought he was normal.

He shuddered.

* * *

Johan Thoms found Anton Chekhov interminably dull and depressing, but knew that the old Russian had every reason to be down.

The French, he concluded, were far too pretentious, but then, like the rest of civilization, Johan didn’t gravitate toward them as a people anyway. Victor Hugo and Baudelaire were excused. When Johan read of a trial over the publication of Madame Bovary, Flaubert too found favor. He was granted special status when Johan read the judge’s summing up: “No gauze for him, no veils—he gives us nature in all her nudity and crudity.”

Anything banned or censored found its way onto Johan’s dustless shelves: Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Moll Flanders, and, latterly, Candide.

Goethe, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Mary Shelley, Keats, Andersen, Zola, Yeats, Marlowe.

He worshipped Darwin for debunking God’s good book. Johan Thoms even shared a birthday with Darwin.

The work of Robert Louis Stevenson amazed Johan. He would enjoy many afternoon discussions of Stevenson with his personal tutor, Professor Tiberius Novac. Their main bone of contention involved Jekyll and Hyde. The professor insisted it was a tale of Victorian double standards. Johan found this far too obvious, and (not that he agreed with Stevenson) observed an anti-Darwinist angle to the story, the worrying implications of meddling with nature. When they weren’t discussing books, Johan was crushing Novac at chess. Tiberius would close his oak study door upon his student’s departure, locking in the magical smell of old volumes, and mop his brow as young Master Thoms marched proudly down the stone hallways.

On glorious afternoons in the fall of ’12 and spring of ’13, Johan and Novac would billet themselves out on the quadrangle lawn under the monkey puzzle trees. They were shaded, too, by the white berry tree, and enveloped in Moroccan jasmine, early spring breezes, and Johan’s budding optimism. In their discussions, Johan reveled in playing the role of Devil’s avocado (Ernest assured me that Johan did not mean to be funny here—his English was indeed flawed, albeit very rarely).

Novac tended to just smile and inhale the scent of a young yellow rosebush over his left shoulder.

Johan realized on one of these afternoons that the theory he had hatched in the hospital all those years before dovetailed perfectly with his disapproval of the Church.

“Life is all just either good luck or bad luck. If those idiots needed something to believe in for their afterlife and salvation, it only means that they are hedging their guilty bets. Ironically, they are the ones, their minds clouded with fear and guilt, who are unable to see the real beauty of the most wonderful coincidence in the Universe. And that is the Universe itself. These religious types, perversely, are too afraid to enjoy this wonderful set of moments, too constipated to witness the greatest glory. And so I resolve to make the present my god.”

Before the hour was up, he was once again either rushing into the future or pondering the past.

* * *

In the early days of college, Johan saw more of the night than he did of the day, and he discovered the wonder of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He did not see only night in it. He also saw the absolute beauty of the love story, and wondered if he would ever experience a love that transcended continents, time, and, indeed, lifetimes. For this he hoped, even though his heart broke for the Transylvanian. He knew that should he stumble across such marvelous misfortune, his own would break as well.

* * *

Johan was way ahead in his schooling. He excelled in languages, and was tutored in Italian, German, Spanish, French, and English. He was soon soaking up literature in all these foreign tongues. He loved how the English refused to compromise with their own translation of bon appétit, recognizing thus with irony that their skills lay not in the culinary arena. He loved Germanic word order, and the implications of placing the verb at the end of a sentence. Everyone would have to be polite and to listen to the full statement without the infernal “May I interject?” although it didn’t seem to have had much effect on Prussian and Teutonic behavior, hubris, and propensity to war.

On the sports field he started to grow into his body. Girls began to notice him.

He had lost his virginity on a cold November day at the age of fourteen to a beauty, Ellen, from the neighboring village. It had been a sublimely unremarkable event. Near the end of his first term at university, he dropped “The Ugly Duckling” on his study desk and ran off to meet a petite, brown-eyed brunette, who would annoyingly insist on inserting her long fingernails into the unsuspecting youth’s urethra. He hoped that this was not normal behavior and that he’d just stumbled upon a degenerate lover, albeit a feisty and infinitely kissable one.

* * *

These seemed halcyon days, although he suffered many dark moments. He lost a series of good friends through accident and illness. The loss of each would, it seemed to his seedling paranoia, follow either a disagreement with Johan, or was bizarrely connected to his reading material at that time.

The news of one friend’s drowning reached Johan as he was reading Herman Melville. While engrossed in Thomas Hardy, he learned of two friends’ simultaneous end, one in a coal-mining accident, the other ravaged by wild dogs in the hills.

A pal who claimed he was possessed by the devil committed suicide as Johan neared the fulcrum of Goethe’s Faust.

An ex-girlfriend gave in to the desperate complications brought on by syphilis as Johan waded through Madame Bovary.

An English nautical friend went down with his ship when Johan had barely begun Robinson Crusoe and was still fifteen pages from the end of Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus. The statistics were now suggesting to him that this might be more than coincidence: he might have developed a reverse Midas touch.

* * *

Johan’s best chum at university was William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright, a confident, ebullient Englishman studying psychology and philosophy. Johan became heavily anglicized in his chum’s presence, earning himself an English nickname—“Bighead”—as well as the Spanish “El Capitán,” which originated in his choice of cologne, a spicy number with a hint of oak from a local bespokerie.

Johan mimicked his pal, subconsciously adopting his physical mannerisms, his English turns of phrase, and his fondness for filth and crassness.

Bill Cartwright was the son of a diplomat, the right-hand man to the British ambassador to Bosnia. The family came from Huddersfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Billy had been a well-spoken youth, but chose to discard his demeanor of privilege. Instead he presented himself as a rough-edged commoner with a broad northern twang and a penchant for the extreme, the hyperbolic, and the damned-right crude. Cartwright was fascinated by the struggles of the workers; he harbored thoughts of revolution. He had been removed from his English boarding school at the age of twelve after one daft prank too many. The final straw involved a bizarre attempt to prove a theorem on probability. Billy had pondered the twin questions of why bread would always seem to fall butter side down and why a cat always landed on its feet. The youth had therefore strapped a slice of bread (butter side up) to a cat’s back and dropped the feline from three floors up in his dormitory, to see which prevailed, the butter or the cat’s paws. The headmaster’s report had jolted Billy’s father into bringing the boy within his paternal reach in Sarajevo, where Billy regularly received an eardrum-rattling clip to the skull. Billy wore each as a badge of honor, for he claimed they all just reminded him that he was alive.

Two

A Vision of Love (Wearing Boxing Gloves)

The female praying mantis devours the male,

While they are mating,

The male sometimes continues copulating,

Even after the female has bitten off his head

and part of his upper torso.

—Tom Waits, “Army Ants”

June 8, 1913. 12:30 P.M.

Sarajevo’s Madresa is one of the oldest seats of learning in Europe. Its theology and law faculties date to 1551. They were built concurrently with the Gazi Husrev Beys mosque, arguably the finest structure of its type in Europe, which housed a wonderfully liberal form of Islam. A more recent addition to the university, in 1878, on extra acreage on the western edge of the city, hugged the River Miljacka. This school was quadrangled around botanical gardens of stunning neoclassical beauty, with sunken gardens and Greek pillars. Ancient ornate tombs, graves, plinth stones, and crosses, each unique, finely littered the gardens, alongside a single white berry tree and a perpetually splashing fountain. Thirty-five-foot ceilings, cool, tiled mosaics, and hardwood staircases twenty feet wide adorned the inside of the building. The main entrance resembled the illegitimate child of the courthouse in New Orleans and the Theatre Royal, Haymarket (an admirable ancestry). The western wing was strangely Moorish in design, but integrated well, as the Muslims had integrated with the Catholics and the Orthodox in the city itself.

Johan Thoms and Billy Cartwright spent many a warm afternoon in informal psychiatric session in the quadrangle, their couch the billiard-baize, manicured lawn. Here Bill poked and prodded at Johan’s mind, initially for a case study, and then out of curiosity, in friendship, and for fun. Staring up at the swaying blossoms and the monkey puzzle trees that bordered the quad, with the azure expanse beyond, Johan was more than happy to be a relaxed guinea pig for his friend. These sessions went uninterrupted unless a pretty young girl wandered by.

“Simply functional,” observed Johan of a girl’s pigtails.

“Blasphemers and infidels. Degenerates and heretics. What a joy!”

“You, my friend, are a malodorous ne’er-do-well!”

“Could not agree more, my friend,” said Billy. “I’d be like a damned bulldog with its face in a bucket of porridge.”

This boy banter went on for most of the afternoon, and well into the summer holidays. Johan reckoned there was nothing wrong with having good friends with whom to mull over the sweetest of subjects in the June sunshine at the age of nineteen, without a care in the world.

“Oh, my word! How would you like to wear THAT as a hat?” said Billy as a heavily pregnant beauty passed by.

“I have a feeling that I would not take it off even for dinner at the dean’s.”

“I am sure the dean would be quite chuffed about that.”

“I am not indulging that old rotter. And at his age, I am sure he would have certain . . . problems.”