The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

He saw an army of a thousand pawns in the celestials, which made him wonder why he was allowed only eight.

Three (#ulink_18e6af1a-5db3-577a-9c71-62e825c2b9a1)

Serendipity’s Day Off (#ulink_18e6af1a-5db3-577a-9c71-62e825c2b9a1)

It’s too soon to tell.

—Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, when asked by Henry Kissinger if he thought the French Revolution of 1789 had been of benefit to humanity

It was serendipity’s day off,” insisted my grandfather Ernest. “By all rights, Johan Thoms should have been blinded, if not killed, as a seven-year-old.”

June 1901. Near Sarajevo.

Johan’s boyhood nightly routine had been an odd one.

First, he would close his eyes and mentally check off each of the continents on his father’s huge ancient globe, which Drago had requisitioned from the school where he worked. The spherical atlas held center stage in the living room, its pink, yellow, and red landmasses enveloped by the blue oceans. The globe also held special status for the boy, as it was larger (however marginally) than his own head. He would spend hours in bed remembering its countries, its capitals, and its seas. As time went by, he increased the difficulty of his nocturnal examinations, testing himself with the capital of Ceylon, the neighboring bodies of water to the Yellow Sea, or the longitudes of Costa Rica’s coastlines. His spongelike brain soaked up everything.

After this initial task, he would transport himself mentally to the side of a deserted rural road. In his reveries, a leaden sky threatened a premature dusk. In a lay-by sat an empty mustard-yellow carriage. The horses had been released. This abandoned cart marked the part of the forest where he would meet his friend. Young Johan then had to stand absolutely motionless next to the wood, and stare in until his pal arrived. This would complete his nightly duties.

His chum was a stag deer, and possessor of the land’s largest antlers—fourteen blades, to be exact. Some nights Johan would lie there for hours, staring at the vivid canvas on the inside of his neuronized eye, awaiting the appearance of the friendly, beckoning deer thirty yards or so into the thick forest. Other nights the deer appeared within minutes, even seconds. Johan had no control. He could only get there and stare into the dense green and brown. But after a glint in the eye and a nod from his imaginary buddy, he would be allowed to enter a restful, deep sleep. If he did not obey these rules, he believed, the world would be nudged off its axis.

* * *

Johan had been visiting the same spot in his mind every night for a couple of years when his parents sent him on a holiday to the countryside. Rudimentary tents; appalling food with grit and burned grass, cremated on campfires; mildly disgusting ditties sung around the campfire every night by the older boys.

On the final afternoon, the group was taken to a local landed estate, where various wild species roamed. It had been a tinderbox of a summer, the hottest in living memory. Ten minutes after arriving, the group was led off to a crumbling canteen at the edge of a lake to hydrate themselves before the afternoon’s exertions. That is, everyone apart from one melon-headed, blue-eyed, stick-legged youth who had spotted one of the most common species in the park, a deer. Johan was in a trance. It was his friend!

At last, he could meet him and talk to him, as he had wished for every night since he could remember.

No one saw the boy stagger off in the opposite direction to the rest of his group. He stumbled in the field’s divots and potholes, like the town drunk leaving the tavern at midnight, toward his buddy. Mothers the world over would have picked him up, wrapped him in cotton wool, and stolen away to the hills with him.

His target was minding his own business, eating grass in the clearing with several other deer. Johan had never been so excited. How come they had not told him he was going to see his friend today? He reached the beast with unusual confidence and speed, and greeted his pal.

“Hello you. I have come to see you. They never told me I was coming; I don’t know if they told you.”

The deer stopped munching for a few seconds and eyed him with mistrust.

“I’m on holiday. I guess you’re on holiday from the woods, too. Sometimes I wait hours for you, but I want you to know that I do not mind,” Johan said.

A couple of the other deer had now raised their heads.

“Do you like it better out here than in the woods?”

No answer.

“Your antlers are bigger than usual.

“It’s so hot today, though. Aren’t you hot under all that fur?”

No answer. Johan moved closer to try to pat the deer but had to delve between his huge antlers to reach the promised land of the beast’s fuzzy forehead. This was permitted for all of two seconds. Johan felt a rush of love, then something else inside his brain. The deer had raised his head back and taken Johan part of the way with him. The antlers ripped deep into the young boy’s head. Johan had whispered the words I love you, as near the deer’s ears as he could. From the canteen, the group gasped as the creature lifted Johan clear of the long grass and catapulted him like a rag doll into an expanse of nettly gorse. Wads of blood caught the light of the sun. The deer volleyed back six feet from the human debris, calmed himself, and carried on grazing. Johan was left facedown, rapidly leaking rhesus positive from his temple. The last thing he remembered thinking before a blackness overtook him was, What have I done to upset my friend? Should I have let him know last night that I was coming?

He did not cry.

* * *

He regained consciousness swaddled in bandages that magnified his large skull. He was in a crisp sterile linen hospital bed, stitched up, wrapped in white, and as high as any seven-year-old could be.

Over the coming days, he started to piece together what had happened. His friend Deer had butted him, punctured his head, and put him firmly on the seat of his little blue shorts. Friends can be so cruel. Every night for almost two weeks after, Johan would return in his mind’s eye to the side of the forest, to the lay-by, next to the mustard carriage, to wait for his friend and forgive him. He needed to apologize for turning up at the park without warning; it had just not been polite. If there was one thing he was learning from his parents, it was the importance of manners.

Johan did not want to lose his best friend. However, over the coming weeks, no matter how long he stayed awake, no visitor came from the woods to tell him everything was all right. Some nights he would not sleep. No deer appeared. The only time he would drift off without Deer’s permission was after the administration of another batch of opiates.

He had been a lucky lad. The antler had entered the skull in that tenderest spot to the north by northwest of the temple. He had come within a fraction of an inch of losing his eye, of permanent brain damage. (This would perhaps explain his tendency later in life to don a pirate’s patch.) The doctors proclaimed it a miracle that he was not dead. While he was being lifted clean off the ground, Johan’s medicine-ball head had acted as a buffer, and so he lived to tell the tale.

* * *

The anguish of Johan’s parents was outweighed only by the relief they felt when it became apparent that this had been one very lucky escape. They battled through all the obvious parental horrors: thoughts of burying him, of no life in his corpse; of his wispy blond hair and tiny fingernails still growing underground, his lips turning green before fully decomposing; of him rotting in a tiny coffin while the world went on in the marketplace and the classroom around their absolute hells. Of placing favorite chess pieces on a fresh mound of earth as they returned each day to stand Johan’s figurine soldiers back up on the sinking turf. Parents are not supposed to put any of their kids into the ground; to have two out of two dead would probably have been too much for Drago and Elena.

The hospital staff adopted Johan Thoms as their mascot. This was the same precocious child who had also almost defeated, and hence retired, the local legend of a chess master. As the story of the weird kid who talked to deer spread, so did the young boy’s influence. This fleeting fame meant he received the best care possible, and was given precedence over the old guys down the hall who could not stop defecating themselves during the day or trying to hump each other during the night, and over the mad old crones on the ground floor, who yelled for the return of infants lost forty years ago, for husbands lost the previous week, for items lost from their stubborn-stained, chin-hugging underwear drawer the previous day. One resourceful lunatica had been stealing these panties with ever-increasing cunning and throwing them in the duck pond in the orchard, at the hindquarters of the hospital.

The ducks soon left.

* * *

When the owner of the estate with the deer park returned from philandering, pinballing, and buggering his way around the gentlemen’s clubs of London’s Soho and Mayfair, a generous donation was made to the hospital.

Of Austrian extraction and a distant cousin of Franz Joseph and the Hapsburgs, Count Erich von Kaunitz XV enjoyed decent relations with Vienna. He was not so sure that this status would be maintained if his nocturnal activities in London were known. He had been well acquainted with the Oscar Wilde crowd. He yearned to be stunningly handsome. As a younger man, Kaunitz had turned a few heads, but the side effects of his excesses could not be masked over à la Dorian Gray. He wanted to have a young maiden swoon at fifty paces, even if it were merely to keep those wagging tongues still. It was, however, the love that dared not speak its name that was the Count’s allure.

Without siblings, the Count had inherited the family fortune. He was ludicrously rich, and was considered by the Hapsburgs to be one of their less formal social bridgeheads in Bosnia. His estate of over three thousand acres was home to hundreds of grazing fourteen-bladed deer, and its palatial castle of white neo-Moorish splendor, all verdigris, garlic-headed domes and proud spires, was superior to any other in the Balkans. Though he tried to pass himself off as one of them, the Count was considered by the locals to be very much part of the well-oiled imperial machine. This he would take any opportunity to rectify. Within days of the Count’s return from England, therefore, the hospital duly received its benefactor at a renaming ceremony attended by the press from Sarajevo and a lone photographer.

As for the young lad, who stared through the small gap in his bandages with the bluest eyes, it was announced that he would receive the antlers of the guilty deer, to have them mounted on a wall. It would be the beast’s turn to be the spit-roasted guest of honor at the Count’s next royal banquet. Johan nearly relapsed when he heard this. He did not want his friend punished, never mind killed for dinner. His insomnia was fueled, and he would lie awake wondering how Deer slept with such an awkward appendage on his head. Johan waited by the forest in the lay-by beside the deserted mustard-yellow carriage to warn his friend, but it was no use. He believed that his pal must be consumed by guilt and must have made his way deep into the forest to pay his penance.

His be-antlered buddy never came to see him ever again.

* * *

The Count told Johan that he was free to visit the castle when he was well again, at any time, although he privately pointed out to the boy’s family that he would require at least four days’ notice. Even more privately, the Count pointed out to his small (yet dependable) circle of servants that this lead time was necessary to clean up the debris of his notorious sodomous gatherings, which lasted for days and covered many acres.

The Count promised that Johan’s family never would want for anything, though he was not writing them into his will. As it turned out, his promise was more of a renewable, inexhaustible as-needed job offer. It really did not seem like much of an offer at the time at all. Yet as the cameras clicked away at the posing Count and a bandaged but standing Johan, the photographer was disturbed by something in his view. He moved around the awkward camera on its clumsy tripod to investigate whatever had landed on his apparatus. He shooed it away.

There was a click, a puff of smoke, and all was done for the day.

It would be about a dozen years before Johan saw his benefactor again, and longer still before it dawned on Johan that Count Kaunitz was one of the most generous and beautiful human beings any one of us could ever wish to meet.

Around the photographer’s head, the butterfly which had briefly rested on the lens flapped its wings and slowly headed toward the pollen-flecked hospital orchard before taking flight on a slow, winding thermal toward Sarajevo, to the north.

* * *

The hospital was sparse. Paint peeled from the walls and the smell of bleach only briefly won its perpetual war over tobacco, vomit, and feces.