The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. Ian Thornton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

       Pawn to Queen Four

       Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders.

      —Savielly Tartakower

       May 1901. Near Sarajevo.

      Most adults fell in love with Johan’s deep blue eyes, but his contemporaries at school preferred to concentrate on the size of his ash-blond mopped head, which was larger than average at best. At worst, he resembled a fugitive from Easter Island.

      Johan walked with that six-year-old’s nongait, which, accentuated by the size of his head and pipe-cleaner legs, verged on a cute stagger.

      Of his two passions, soccer and chess, he was far better at chess. With a ball, his will was strong, but not his art. His feet were way too small to keep his head from overstepping his center of gravity, and down he would come. His stock answer whenever some clever clogs informed him that he had fallen over was to slowly get up, dust himself off, and say that he was merely trying to break a bar of chocolate that he had in his back pocket.

      On the chessboard, however, he could be nasty. His innocent blue eyes and waifish body masked a killer instinct. In front of the sixty-four squares, he was closer in spirit to Attila the Hun than to Little Lord Fauntleroy.

      It must have been the size of that head.

      In Johan’s ninth summer, Senad Pestic, the Bosnian grand master and stooping old Arab, came to a school ten miles away from Johan’s, on the southern slopes of Mount Igman, to play against all the best boys in the area. It was an annual event and Johan’s first time. The matches were scheduled for four-thirty, after school and at forty tables set up in a circle in the main hall.

      One of Johan’s uncles, Toothless Mico, usually ferried him to chess meets, but tonight Johan wanted only one person to be there: his mother. She would be so proud of her only child, and the little boy always wanted to please her. But she was too busy selling the fruit of (and for) her feudal boss from a makeshift hut in the town square. He comforted himself that if he continued to progress at the game, before long he would be beating grand masters for fun.

      The grand master would play games against all the boys simultaneously. The honor in being the last to lose was immense, and legends could grow around boys who had come close to victory. No one from the area had ever beaten the old genius. Each board had a rudimentary clock to the right of the set, on the old guy’s side, consisting of oversized hourglasses, egg timers, and abaci. Each board had a different-shaped bean counter, loaned from the classrooms. Every time the sands of time ran out on a player, a bean was shifted.

      Heads! Johan won the flip of a coin and chose white.

      Good versus evil, Johan chanted inside his skull, as if the future of mankind depended on him. Good versus evil.

      After twenty revolutions, some boys had been humiliated and were back in the schoolyard kicking their heels or being herded home by their shamed parents. Not Johan Thoms. His stubborn little legs did not even reach the floor from his seat. He pulled his socks up to below his bare knees every ten minutes or so and waited for his enemy to approach. He left one shoelace untied, for that, to the superstitious boy, represented Pestic—“the one Johan Thoms would famously undo.”

      The grand master spent more time at Johan’s table than at any of the others, and Johan’s confidence grew as he realized he was at least doing better than his contemporaries.

      The little boy (white) had adopted the Oleg Defense. Pestic (black) was wide-eyed at this feisty approach; one had to know the play in depth, its history, its options and permutations, if one were to succeed.

      Johan made the crusty old codger scratch his manky head. That, though, could easily have been a flea, causing some bother at the funeral of one of his thousand or so relatives whose ancestors had made this genius their home a decade before.

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