The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

And I am the Life . . .”

Ernest tapped on the window. The old man stopped moving and turned slowly to him, seeming to beckon him in.

Ernest entered the shack hesitantly. The door opened slowly and required the help of Ernest’s upper arm to overcome the resistance, though there was neither lock nor latch. There were minimal signs of a woman’s recent presence: a tray with two plates, cutlery and an empty goblet, a jug of water, a vase of yellow roses. By them he saw an exquisite old man, with a mournful, creased countenance and worldly-wise eyes that appeared a youthful blue.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” the old man said in a superb English accent. “You might be in a position to help me. The alignment of events is quite remarkable, and I see now perhaps necessary. Are you fond of mathematics, my friend? Symmetry? Patterns? The Laws of Physics? I suspect you think I am a madman. I always proudly confess this to be true. For what is the blasted point otherwise?”

Ernest chuckled, and then chuckled again when he realized that the old man was being totally serious.

“And what about time travel?” the old man continued. “I think I may be about to crack it. Johan Thoms is the name,” he said.

Ernest moved cautiously across the worn boards into an area less cramped by relics and reminders whose relevance he was soon to understand. This old man’s collection appeared to him to encapsulate a life, and to fill his nostrils with a poignant aroma, a scent of a moment in time.

He watched as the man edged forward, barefoot. Barely keeping his balance, he shuffled to a stop. Ernest continued to observe the solitarian.

“These things you see here are my vortex, my portal, a wormhole in the space-time continuum, my passage back in time.”

They heard a noise in the corner of his shack.

“That bastard thug of a rat is back to ruin my day!”

He started to reach for a rusty old fork that lay on the stained sideboard beside him. But before he had managed any back lift with which to propel the missile, the toothy rodent was gone.

“One of these old friends shall allow me to slip through, slip back. My escape route.”

The old man waved at a handful of aged objects, nestled around him in his makeshift hermitage; a trilogy of aged books, some sepia photographs, a wireless radio set, a crystal paperweight within which a bit of paper seemed to float, a battered typewriter, several bound manuscripts, an empty bottle of cologne, a remarkable open sea chest filled with yellowed, crispy letters and powder-blue ones written in the same tidy feminine handwriting. “If I concentrate hard enough at the right time, when the stars are in the right constellation,” he explained to Ernest, “I’m sure I’ll be transported back through history.” Back to the time when the paper was new, without words. To when the ink was royal blue, fresh and wet, still on the nib hovering above the top left corner of the sheet and about to leave its indelible and permanent message.

Johan picked up a handful of the blue sheets, inhaled deeply, a trace of a smile on his lips, and then passed them to Ernest, keeping his eyes on them. Some were addressed in identical fine calligraphy to Miss Blanche de la Peña.

Johan continued. “I shall now glide back to our belle époque. I shall balance the books and save mankind. And this time around I shall perhaps allow myself the small luxury of being with her. I know where and when to find her. Even if I did not, my pulse should be drawn to her conductivity.” Here he paused, closing his eyes and gathering his breath. “This time I shall bathe in her. This time she will be my perpetual banquet of roasted delights and also my scarlet Bacchus with which to wash her own self down. I swear it.” His diatribe gathered momentum and volume, reaching a crescendo. “As a youth, I shall keep one eye on the white June night when we shall meet on the lawns of the Old Sultan’s Palace, but I shall glide there and not burn my precious days en route. I shall bask in the knowledge of devilish, God-given treats ahead to be devoured over decades. She will feel a vampirus coming through time. She will demand it and recognize it when it comes with uncomfortable, pleasurable consternation. Lorelei!”

He paused, and tilted his head back to speak to a higher power.

“Dionysus! Inform those spirits to clear the way, for my dry run is over, and what sort of cretin does not learn by his mistakes, particularly ones of the magnitude and the severity in which I infamously deal?

“I have attempted to cultivate the mythical and elusive Blue Rose of Forgetfulness to erase my memory forever and to therefore discover the ecstatic state of knowing no pain, but I have merely succeeded in shrouding and blanketing the landscape around this hut in a mass of flowers of varying hues of azure. Indeed, the shades of the flora only haunt me more, reminding me of my pivotal summer almost ninety years ago. Time is so short. I have to escape this scabby quod, this jail, this grimmest of prisons which I call my mind, which is right now closing in on the remnants of my consciousness and the shards of my sanity. If only I could find that portal back. For the sake of all mankind.

“I am the Resurrection

And I am the Life.”

He repeated this until his deluded mantra was broken by his own words.

“I have afflicted every soul on this planet. Believers and infidels. Heretics and blasphemers. I defy you to find a life I have not changed or ended. The twentieth century was mine. Just the final Apocalypse to welcome in. Should I have the politeness, should I display the etiquette to die first?”

My grandfather Ernest did nothing all Easter weekend but sit in one of Bosnia’s most dilapidated chairs, in an excuse of a dwelling, with another old man. He did not budge except to urinate and to move his bowels. Uncharacteristically, Ernest hardly said a word himself. He just sat and listened. It was one old gentleman’s story to another; that of the host, a tale which covers a life of over one hundred years; the other not far off, and therefore (as in many biographies and autobiographies) one where a day may seem to last an age and where a decade may slip by within a sentence or paragraph.

According to my grandfather, Johan claimed to have changed—actually to have destroyed—the twentieth century.

Ernest had hoped to keep the story for a time when we would have an adequate number of days together to record the magnum opus of Johan Thoms. There remained within him a discipline to do things correctly and with due process, though this was marvelously mixed with a sense of the romantic and the truly delicious. My grandfather, the ordered musician, the headmaster, the recounter of fine and giant fables. Time, though, would have her wicked way. And so it was my task, my solemn duty, not only to hear the tale of Johan Thoms, but to complete it. Ernest pleaded with me, “Glide gently, my dear boy. In buttercup times. Down country lanes. Never forgetting to fall out from the ranks, look over that old gate, and to smile.”

Part One (#ulink_329fe2ba-a4b8-5fc7-a3b8-eeeecfc2fee3)

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

One (#ulink_fa21daba-3f0f-5e00-ad0b-7324498bf600)

Around the Time When Adolf Was a Glint in His First Cousin’s Eye (#ulink_fa21daba-3f0f-5e00-ad0b-7324498bf600)

Give and it shall be given to you. For whatever measure you deal out to others, it will be dealt to you in return.

—Luke 6:38

February 1894. Bosnia

Johan Thoms (pronounced Yo-han Tomes) was born in Argona, a small town twenty-three miles south of Sarajevo, during the hellish depths of winter 1894.

His family was not overly religious. They were, however, surrounded in the village by enough Catholicism to expose Johan osmotically to the curse of guilt.

Johan was an only child, and had been lucky to live through a worrying labor. He was a breach birth, and arrived a month early, on the twelfth of February. He had jaundice and coughed up blood. The umbilical cord was wrapped tight around his neck. Thick black curls crowned his large head. The cause of his parents’ worry was that another boy had been born to them four years earlier in exactly the same manner. He’d shared the same characteristics: the yellow skin, the breach, the cord, the blood, the hair. Carl had not survived. Drago and Elena feared a repeat. It was probably from this fear that there developed an extra-special bond between parents and child.

Johan pulled through. Within three months, he shed his sub-Saharan curls, and he appeared less yellow by the day. With his now fair hair, the blue eyes of his mother, Elena, and the surname Thoms, there was more than a hint in Johan of Aryanesque lineage from Austria and the north. He became almost normal looking.

Johan was happier than most boys, alone with a soccer ball in the street, or a chess set in front of the hearth. Even if he was only playing against himself—usually the domain of the autistic and potentially schizophrenic—he would remain occupied for hours.

He was a smart child, and he went about his boyhood business with a minimum of fuss. If it had not been for the food disappearing from his plate three times daily, his underclothes getting a weekly scrub, and his bedclothes marginally disturbed each morning, his parents might have sworn that they were nursing nothing more than a friendly poltergeist. He was ordinary and unobtrusive. If he was two, three, or even four hours late home from school, he was not missed. Maybe it would have been better for all involved if his lateness—due usually to his error-riddled sense of direction—had been noted.

Maybe then, things would have been different.

* * *

Johan’s father, Drago, was also an only child, born on his parents’ isolated farm near the Serbian border in 1854. He was forty years old by the time young Johan appeared.

Drago resembled a mad professor (which was convenient given that he was one, albeit a fine one). His unruly hair looked like it was always ready for a street battle, and he lacked full vision in his right eye. He loved to don an eye patch, but equally enjoyed switching the patch from one eye to the other, or even to remove it to see people struggle to know into which pupil to look. His poor vision meant he only did this when stationary, to avoid accidents. This was one of his many ideas of fun. Yet his strong, handsome features outweighed his quirks. He was a strapping six foot three and boasted a lean jaw, olive skin, mocha eyes, and a regulation fashion sense. However, he always donned at least one distinctive, unforgettable item on any given day. This might be a solid silver pocket watch (engraved, chiming, charming), or bright red socks; or, to complement a handlebar mustache, he would loop around his sinewy neck a gold chain with a miniature comb attached. He christened the comb “Jezebel” and would run her through his hirsute top lip.

Drago had flat feet and a tendency to waffle on about absolutely nothing for an age, often to complete strangers. But he had a huge heart. The whole town knew it, as he teased and trundled through his daily life without setting their world on fire.

Two (#ulink_d188d596-9dcc-538f-8852-6cbebe432b8d)

Pawn to Queen Four (#ulink_d188d596-9dcc-538f-8852-6cbebe432b8d)

Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders.

—Savielly Tartakower

May 1901. Near Sarajevo.