The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

1885

and

The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nefzaoui

Or the Arab Art of Love, sixteenth century

Translated from the French Version of the Arabian MS.

1886

Johan set about slow foreplay with the books, studying them tantrically. Intrigued by the genre, and knowing that barely a thousand copies had been published of Richard F. Burton’s unsurpassed translations, he then scoured the college and the city’s secondhand bookstores for a copy of The Arabian Nights. He would eventually find a copy under the pillow of the woman who would change his life. In fact, she had already set about this particular task, just hours before, at that hotbed of Oriental debauchery and degeneracy, the Old Sultan’s Palace.

Lorelei Ribeiro was currently lying in a cool bath in Suite 30 of the Hotel President, not more than three-quarters of a mile from where Johan was slowly digesting the ins and outs of coitus. Rolling around in the relaxing waters of her tub, this rare beauty would have been a picture for any man (as well as most women, hermaphrodites, and eunuchs) to behold. The bathtub brimmed with scented oils of gardenia and ylang-ylang. The smooth, dark skin of her legs shone with the oil as the back of her knees rested on the rim of the tub, her glistening fetlocks and feet dangling akimbo on the outside. Her head lay back, submerged to her brow. The ceiling fan whirred above enviously.

When Lorelei eventually did get out of her bath, with fingers still not crinkled, it was to head to her bed and the breakfast tray of luscious fruits and cold coffee which the room-service staff had left an hour previously. She sat on the white duvet in her bathrobe, towel wrapped on her head, and poured a healthy dose of strong cold coffee into her mouth. She turned on the gramophone and listened. A soothing harp filled the room, from deep shag carpets to palatial ceiling.

* * *

Later, in the heat of the afternoon, Lorelei flounced around Bascarsija and along the banks of the Miljacka, a glorious swathe in white, turning heads all along her route. Wives smacked husbands’ arms. Cars narrowly avoided hitting each other; trees braced themselves for a sudden strike from a fender. The early-afternoon temperature peaked and the locals sweated; the day seemed to stand still for a few minutes, as only summer days can. When Lorelei eventually sauntered back into the cool of the President’s lobby, the ceiling fans were rotating at full tilt, struggling against the early-evening southern European heat.

She instructed the bellhop to come to her floor, and the lift crawled upward, opening onto the third floor hallway, with its deep cream carpets centrally laid on dark brown oak floorboards. The sturdy white walls and high ceilings were interrupted by grainy sepia photographs of mustachioed young men in all-in-one swimsuits and of bonneted ladies in fields of knee-high daisies. One of the ladies showed just a hint of breast. This forced Lorelei to look twice as she stepped out, for the President did have the reputation of being a liberal spot.

The cage door closed behind her. Lorelei dispensed with her shoes. Her feet enjoyed the luxury of the crushed rugs en route to her suite. Manicured phalanges fingered the cold key into the lock.

* * *

Lorelei observed the evening’s arrival from her balcony. The quiet luxury inside the President was at odds with the smoky, squawking city. Both had once been heavily influenced by Islam and by the Turks. The hotel’s mystic Eastern design had evolved, however, into lush cream-and-scarlet carpets, deep mahogany pillars, hygienic modern conveniences, and Western ways. These now were juxtaposed with a metropolis still populated with ancient mosques and bearded street traders, apparently stubbornly lingering from the sixteenth century.

She looked at her thin gold wristwatch and involuntarily slowed her pace. Meanwhile, in the lobby, three dark-suited gentlemen removed their hats, announced their arrival, and headed for the bar.

Forty minutes later, in Suite 30, diamond earrings were clipped and cramponned, a sweet musk of Lyonnais parfum was pumped at the regulatory nine inches, and long black silk gloves were fixed. The thickness of the deep aqua curtains, twenty feet high, now kept out the evening buzz. An envelope had been pushed under Lorelei’s door announcing the arrival of her dinner guests.

Lorelei gathered herself. She headed for the door, head tilted, swaying elegantly.

* * *

The boys walked eagerly over cobbles, but not eagerly enough to prevent Bill from yawning as Johan outlined the theory of the sixty-four practices of the Kama Sutra. A woman who gained mastery of all sixty-four crafts was respected, took her place in a male-dominated world, and became known as a ganika. Bill told him to shut up, but Johan kept the word on his lips.

“Ganika, ganika, ganika . . .”

They entered a trinket-filled, rouge-lit taberne, and Cartwright bought two steins of cold pilsner. Even before he had settled into his seat, he started into a mad monologue. Five minutes passed before Johan realized he had not heard one single word.

“Never mind that, Billy Boy,” Johan interrupted. “Come on. Drink up.”

Johan was in a rush again. His nervous and sometimes infectiously uncomfortable energy was getting the better of him as he whispered to himself some words that kept repeating in his mind.

Glide gently, thus forever glide.

They soon emptied their glasses and disappeared down a side street, into the shadows of the gathered dusk.

“Bon vivants! Good livers!” Johan yelled as their glasses met in the next bar.

Johan told himself he was feeling happy, and bookmarked it for future reference so that he would not feel guilty about letting such a moment slip by him.

Glide gently, El Capitán! Glide gently!

* * *

Mario Srna, Lorelei’s closest ally in the embassy in Vienna, hosted a relaxed dinner at a fine Russian establishment, Troika, just two blocks from the President. Besides Lorelei, Srna’s guests were two old pals from the consulate. The dinner lasted a pleasant two hours, consisting of a deep scarlet beetroot borscht, heavily peppered, followed by sublime roast venison, locally bred from the grounds of the Count of Kaunitz himself—an eccentric, but owner of the finest beasts in the land.

Srna was even offered the animal’s head for his wall as a souvenir, a tradition of the time. He cordially accepted, as he was a gentleman with impeccable etiquette. To turn it down would have been an insult. The head was to be delivered to his town house in Vienna.

Srna was a slight, youthful forty-six-year-old, with clever brown eyes and a peerless generosity of spirit rare among diplomats. He was ambitious, but he achieved what he did through talent, quality, and vision, not Machiavellian techniques. Lorelei looked up to him, yet he was reliant on her as his eyes and his confidante.

The dinner guests were James Whitt and Herb LaRoux, from Boise, Idaho, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, respectively. They contributed adequate tales from the professional field and above-average insight into the realpolitik of Europe and the raping of Africa. They did a fine impression of homosexual twins who were attached at the hip and dressed like each other for reasons over and above cordiality. Srna suggested this to Lorelei as Tweedledee and Tweedledum disappeared off together for a second time.

“Silly fool!” answered Lorelei. “They are smoking opium in the back.”

Srna had had no idea.

“Don’t look so shocked, Mario, you big dummy,” she said, smiling. “Even Queen Victoria used to do it, you know that!”

“That is German propaganda, Lorelei!”

“It is NOT. And she was German, remember! Even Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes doing something like it to chase down Moriarty. They say he is addicted. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The sucking of youth and never seeing daylight. It’s the height of fashion in London, and don’t look so prudish! If you want to be shocked, I will tell you what Prince Albert once had done to his bratwurst!”

When Lorelei had finished telling him, Mario Srna’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He announced that he needed another vodka. The other two dinner guests meandered back from behind a thick curtain in lazy unison. “Na Zdarovye.”

“Vodka is always best tasted at a healthy distance from Moscow!” announced Srna philosophically. “Vodka tasted in Moscow means an imminent visit to the ballet, lurking around some ridiculously icy corner. And endless dishes of potatoes. And Chekhov. Don’t even get me started on Chekhov. Anton, the Darling of the Criminally Depressed and the Champion of Suicidally Dull Birds.”

“Here’s to Anton! na zdarovye, everyone!”

More of the iced firewater thawed any remaining inhibitions. The waiters turned a blind eye to the mild anti-Russianisms around the table (for they themselves were there in Sarajevo for a good reason, and it was not the love of their motherland).

The maître d’ and his tuxedoed crew had started to resemble a cape of vampires. As more vodka was ordered, they gathered at the exits of the large, ancient banqueting hall, now serving only the diplomats’ table. Each had the obligatory widow’s peak and a stare that concentrated somewhere through the eyes and fifty feet beyond the skull of the person he was addressing. Any one of them could have been two hundred and fifty years old while appearing to be fifty. They served everything with a worrying lack of garlic and generous helpings of gloopy Romanian Cabernets. The maître d’ had them all under his control, though his well-practiced misogynist focus was on Lorelei. And to hell with tradition. If, back in the land of his forefathers, the Mad Monk Rasputin could have made passionate, unholy, and hairy love to his queen, and in turn, his queen, Catherine, reputedly died under the weight of an eager, yet somewhat intrigued, copulating stallion, then certainly this beauty might grace his tables and imbibe his vodka. The clear liquid reappeared from an inexhaustible source behind the bloodred curtains.

Srna’s imaginings were elsewhere. Why had Prince Albert done THAT to himself? he thought.

* * *

The fuel from the fine vodka had led the foursome out of the clutches of the polite vampires and into a den of vice. The Cellar sat three meandering city blocks away, and down a side street.

There they took their place around a circular table and ordered overpriced champagne. The conversation swayed pendulously between world politics and a cheaper form of prostitution—the one on offer not twenty feet away. The Cellar also hosted a shockingly untalented, overmaquillaged French cabaret chanteuse, called Dorithe, who croaked a ghastly libretto. According to Herb, her tone resembled that of a goose farting in the fog.

* * *

Meanwhile, more absinthe was firing up the boys as they headed back toward the palace. The streets were quiet.