Ian Thornton - The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

Tiberius’s words of wisdom comforted Johan. He tried his best to believe him.

“At least mine didn’t have a cleft palate and a lazy eye!” he said.

Cartwright guffawed.

* * *

The party was thinning as Professor Novac bade his farewell, with his banshee-cum-gargoyle in tow.

“Oh yes, and one more thing, Johan, that I recall.”

“Yes?” said the young scholar.

Tiberius leaned forward and said quietly into his student’s left ear, “I think I heard you mumble something to her which doubled me up. I should describe it as a guttural growl.”

He leaned in a bit farther and whispered.

Johan Thoms turned June-tuxedo white when he learned of the shocking desire he had expressed. He went to sit down, before he fell down.

He had to stop drinking that stuff!

* * *

Tiberius Novac could be a brute sometimes. After his next tutorial, and perhaps to console Johan, Prof gave away a little more of his eavesdropping, and told the boy he had wonderfully, and with blind poise, stopped Lorelei from stepping on and killing a worm on the palace’s lawn.

Lorelei had then quoted, word-perfectly, a poem by Dorothy Parker.

“It costs me never a stab nor squirm

To tread by chance upon a worm.

“Aha, my little dear,” I say,

“Your clan will pay me back one day!”*

Lorelei and Dorothy Parker were great friends. It was Lorelei who made the introduction to Robert Benchley, who gave Parker her first column in Vanity Fair and her major break. Lorelei had also first shown Parker through the front door of the Algonquin Hotel, and the two ladies shared many an evening, as well as a wit, a beauty, and a style all of their own.

With a confidence one can often only paradoxically achieve in a gutless trance, Johan Thoms had volleyed back with his own second verse, off a martini-stained cuff. He started with a steadying prefix.

“Yes, but . . .”

He straightened his collar, ran a hand through his handsome hair, and added his impromptu reply.

“Yet should one escape by being cremated ,

One’s respite is just belated.

Some clod will throw one’s ashes out.

And frenzied worms shall scream and shout.”

Touché!

He had winked, taken a slug from his glass, and carried on in his trance. Gibbering wreck, to poet genius, back to gibbering wreck. Lorelei had been transfixed, and the deal was as good as done.

* Although published much later, in 1927, the poem had been part of Dorothy’s repertoire for many years.

I shall confine myself neither to Horace’s rules nor to any man’s rules that has ever lived.

—Laurence Sterne , Tristram Shandy

June 9, 1913

Four hours after Johan’s initial encounter with Lorelei and three hundred yards from the front gates of the palace, the heavens opened. It was as if God had turned on a pipe in the ceiling above a film set as Johan plowed on, unsteadily but with a steady determination. He was soaked to the bone, but he pictured Lorelei caught in the downpour, and smiled; when he stumbled ankle-deep into a puddle as he neared the Miljacka, he merely chuckled.

It was almost daylight. Normal people were already rising to go to their work, and bakers had been hard at it for hours already. Soon everyone would be scuttling around in their raincoats, their hats, their umbrellas. It made him feel sad to the pit of his stomach. Their routine, their normality—this was not where he was heading in his life. He segued off into a long train of thought on his deep hatred for umbrellas. He had thoroughly despised them ever since during a force-seven mistral, he had witnessed a young couple kebabed by an errant beach parasol while they were harmlessly copulating. Was the loss of dozens of eyes every year really a price worth paying to avoid a few thousand head colds? What sort of selfish fool would risk others’ eyes with such abandon, just to stay dry? (He had recently read in a science journal that every year, on average, sixty-three eyes were lost to umbrella spikes, but by only sixty-two people. Was someone actually unfortunate enough to lose both? If so, was this in the same incident? Or, even more worrying, two separate ones?)

“So little kindness in the world today,” he muttered. “So little thought for others.”

Then he heard himself repeating, “Bastard umbrellas, bastard umbrellas,” and shook his head to clear it.

He was almost at his dorm. He pulled out his key and slunk into the wonderful old building. The birds nesting in the ivy were tuning up for the day.

Five minutes later, Johan Thoms was on his sheltered balcony, dried off, naked on his back, fast asleep.

* * *

Moments after he awoke, Johan found himself watching a lone and final drop of rainwater overstay its welcome on the nearest leaf of ivy.

Johan turned his head away, and saw that an envelope had been slipped beneath his door. He climbed down from his perch in the window, and slid in bare feet across the shiny floorboards, as if he were ice-skating on the River Miljacka at Christmas. It was with far less grace than he wished. He could glide only three feet in his dormroom. Still, for a split second, he could pretend that he was capable of more elegance.

A line came into his head, one that in the past had seemed to leave a deep, unshiftable hollow feeling. He knew he was guilty of trying to live too fast, of wishing his life away. Yet this time the line was not unwelcome, for it reminded him of the beauty of his life right now:

“Glide gently, thus forever glide.”

He reached the doorway unscathed and picked up the envelope. The handwriting was his mother’s, and an underlying sense of dread and worry made him pause. He could not think why—he often received letters from her.

He hurriedly slipped his letter opener into the right-hand side, and flicked it open with a swish of the wrist.

Dear Johan ,

Bad news, I am afraid. Your father has lost his job.

So, I hate to put this on you, son, but we need your help.

We all know how important your studies are to you (and therefore to us) and we love you for this, so God forbid they be affected.

Your father sends his love. As do I (of course).

With all my heart,Your Mama xxx

He closed the letter slowly and slipped it back into the envelope, staring straight ahead.

* * *

At night, Johan’s father, Drago, used to tell the boy fairy tales. The magical stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm would bring each day to a close. Drago then would return to one of his three favorite hobbies: campanology, constructing matchstick models, and collecting pinecones.

Every morning, Drago rose at six minutes past six. He showered in cold water for nine minutes. He ate a bowl of cold salted porridge. He imbibed two glasses of tepid water. He tried to put a comb through his crazy locks after he’d shaved his beard, already heavy after twenty-four hours. Johan used to love rubbing his face against his father’s five-o’clock shadow, begging his dad to give him a chin pie.

Drago left the house on the stroke of eight every morning and walked (always without an umbrella, for he, like Johan, suspected them of mischief) the two miles to school. He taught an array of subjects to an array of ages, but his lectures were always met with enthusiasm, for they were delivered at an impeccably high level.

He was a jack of all trades and a master of many: languages to philosophy, sciences to the arts.

He remembered every pupil he had ever had, their quirks and their strengths. He had a private joke with each of them. This endeared him to everyone at the school.