The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

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: Ulysses, Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Moll Flanders, Candide, and, latterly, Chatterley.

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 (#ulink_b3b5ca14-d900-503d-b4af-411f0bc9ef19)

A Vision of Love (Wearing Boxing Gloves) (#ulink_b3b5ca14-d900-503d-b4af-411f0bc9ef19)

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.”