The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. Ian Thornton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      One little boy lay there, with a gaping hole in his bulbous head. He was the most grateful recipient of the nurses’ toil and of the generosity of spirit which is unique to their calling, the selfless act of giving care to the injured, sick, and dying. Johan spent many hours watching them as they scurried through the hospital injecting, chatting, and joking to a beat, in order to overcome the horror of their tasks. He would catch them yawning after marathon shifts, or crying after a particular old guy had rattled his last breath. While his friends were being force-fed Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Islam, it was these women whose impression began to form in him a worldview based on everyday experience.

      Johan had started to piece together his own proposition for the nature of things. He had learned at school that humans breathed out just enough carbon dioxide to feed the trees, which in turn returned just the right amount of oxygen for humans. Then there was the sun, which was just far enough away to keep him warm and to grow crops, and to give the world light for enough time to do work and have a bit of play before proffering the night, which loaned just enough darkness to allow sleep, for tomorrow’s energy. If the sun were any closer, life would not be possible; any farther away, he would freeze. There was just enough food on the table for when he was hungry, and if he was thirsty, there was stuff he could pour into his mouth to quench his thirst. If he was cold, there were clothes or a fire, and there was ice for a hot day. He had a soccer ball or a chess set when he was bored. There were those injections and white tablets for when his head hurt. There had been horses to take men around, and now there were engines and automobiles to do it as well. There seemed to be someone for every job. Everything just seemed to work, but was its sheer brilliance by divine design? Or, more likely, was it just too marvelous to have been designed? He started to suspect, with increasing evidence, the latter.

      And here were these wonderful women in starched white who would give love and comfort to those with little love and no comfort. He presumed that there were just enough of these generous girls, spread around the globe the right distance apart, that he would never be alone with his pain and would always be clean, surrounded by caring faces and by loving hands, which would put him back together again. The scattering of these angels meant that everywhere had just enough and they were not in excess or shortfall in any one location. The pieces of life’s jigsaw seemed to fall into place, so well designed that there could not possibly be a God who could be doing this. It was just too big a job.

      He considered infinity in the other direction, to the smallest particle. If x was an atom, y, cosmic vastness, and z, time, it was just too much. It was miraculous in its nature, in its randomness, in its nondesign. Just one huge coincidence that all seemed to work. From the nurses and their love, he extrapolated a theory that explained everything. It was naive and juvenile (he was just a small boy), but also incredibly neat and real.

      The Universe (and everything in it) had been arrived at simply by a series of coincidences—good luck and bad luck, and nothing more. He was convinced of what Caesar had once suspected: that the skies had endured for whatever reason, but that his own future was yet to be determined. His path was in the palm of his own hand. Johan gave God zero credit for life’s СКАЧАТЬ