Ian Thornton - The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

Well, at least, at first.

* * *

So when, in June 1913, a letter arrived at the ancient University of Sarajevo addressed to Johan Thoms, it urged the recipient to consider making a small sacrifice for the greater familial good.

Johan considered bar work (he had made plenty of contacts from his time spent on the other side), laboring (but he was too uncoordinated to be of much use, those skinny matchstick legs and small feet), but it would really be more a question of what he could find.

He then recalled a summer over a decade before, when a wealthy young nobleman offered help of any kind should he or his family ever require it. He was still owed by the crazed, philandering, bug-eyed, buggering count whose buck had once almost taken the young lad’s eye and his life. It was time for Count Sodom to make good on his promise. Johan went to his old oak study desk, pulled out a yellowed notebook, and flicked through it. He came to a page written in a childish scrawl, very much that of a seven-year-old. Johan Thoms then took out his best writing paper, pen, and inkpot and started to write:

Dear Count ,

I hope you may remember me . . .

Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra, as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?

—Frank Zappa

June 9, 1913

After he had written his note, Johan Thoms spent the next part of the searing June day that followed reading and rereading a rare copy of the Kama Sutra , one of the first ever published in English, part of a trilogy. He had procured the collection by a stroke of luck. The tutor who had lent it to him lost his job at the college for exposing himself to a group of visiting nuns from County Cork. The professor fled the university in shame before Johan could return the books.

The books were to become Johan’s lifelong companions, to accompany him throughout his adventures as he traversed the continent and zigzagged his way through a self-induced mayhem. The trilogy (along with a number of other objects collected around this time) would then become the focus for his final whirlpool of psychosis. But I am rushing ahead.

The edition was a beauty, printed on thick paper. Its white vellum binding, trimmed with gold, boasted the original extended title:

The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana

Translated from the Sanscrit

In Seven Parts, with Preface, Introduction and Concluding Remarks

The inside cover offered further intrigue and mystery:

Cosmopoli: 1883; for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, and for private circulation only

(Bizarrely, Vatsyayana always claimed that he was celibate.)

The other books Johan had inherited from his nun-loving mentor bore equally intriguing titles.

Ananga-Ranga and the Hindu Art of Love

Translated from the Sanscrit and annotated by A.F.F. and B.F.R.

1885

and

The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nefzaoui

Or the Arab Art of Love, sixteenth century

Translated from the French Version of the Arabian MS.

1886

Johan set about slow foreplay with the books, studying them tantrically. Intrigued by the genre, and knowing that barely a thousand copies had been published of Richard F. Burton’s unsurpassed translations, he then scoured the college and the city’s secondhand bookstores for a copy of The Arabian Nights. He would eventually find a copy under the pillow of the woman who would change his life. In fact, she had already set about this particular task, just hours before, at that hotbed of Oriental debauchery and degeneracy, the Old Sultan’s Palace.

Lorelei Ribeiro was currently lying in a cool bath in Suite 30 of the Hotel President, not more than three-quarters of a mile from where Johan was slowly digesting the ins and outs of coitus. Rolling around in the relaxing waters of her tub, this rare beauty would have been a picture for any man (as well as most women, hermaphrodites, and eunuchs) to behold. The bathtub brimmed with scented oils of gardenia and ylang-ylang. The smooth, dark skin of her legs shone with the oil as the back of her knees rested on the rim of the tub, her glistening fetlocks and feet dangling akimbo on the outside. Her head lay back, submerged to her brow. The ceiling fan whirred above enviously.

When Lorelei eventually did get out of her bath, with fingers still not crinkled, it was to head to her bed and the breakfast tray of luscious fruits and cold coffee which the room-service staff had left an hour previously. She sat on the white duvet in her bathrobe, towel wrapped on her head, and poured a healthy dose of strong cold coffee into her mouth. She turned on the gramophone and listened. A soothing harp filled the room, from deep shag carpets to palatial ceiling.

* * *

Later, in the heat of the afternoon, Lorelei flounced around Bascarsija and along the banks of the Miljacka, a glorious swathe in white, turning heads all along her route. Wives smacked husbands’ arms. Cars narrowly avoided hitting each other; trees braced themselves for a sudden strike from a fender. The early-afternoon temperature peaked and the locals sweated; the day seemed to stand still for a few minutes, as only summer days can. When Lorelei eventually sauntered back into the cool of the President’s lobby, the ceiling fans were rotating at full tilt, struggling against the early-evening southern European heat.

She instructed the bellhop to come to her floor, and the lift crawled upward, opening onto the third floor hallway, with its deep cream carpets centrally laid on dark brown oak floorboards. The sturdy white walls and high ceilings were interrupted by grainy sepia photographs of mustachioed young men in all-in-one swimsuits and of bonneted ladies in fields of knee-high daisies. One of the ladies showed just a hint of breast. This forced Lorelei to look twice as she stepped out, for the President did have the reputation of being a liberal spot.

The cage door closed behind her. Lorelei dispensed with her shoes. Her feet enjoyed the luxury of the crushed rugs en route to her suite. Manicured phalanges fingered the cold key into the lock.

* * *

Lorelei observed the evening’s arrival from her balcony. The quiet luxury inside the President was at odds with the smoky, squawking city. Both had once been heavily influenced by Islam and by the Turks. The hotel’s mystic Eastern design had evolved, however, into lush cream-and-scarlet carpets, deep mahogany pillars, hygienic modern conveniences, and Western ways. These now were juxtaposed with a metropolis still populated with ancient mosques and bearded street traders, apparently stubbornly lingering from the sixteenth century.

She looked at her thin gold wristwatch and involuntarily slowed her pace. Meanwhile, in the lobby, three dark-suited gentlemen removed their hats, announced their arrival, and headed for the bar.

Forty minutes later, in Suite 30, diamond earrings were clipped and cramponned, a sweet musk of Lyonnais parfum was pumped at the regulatory nine inches, and long black silk gloves were fixed. The thickness of the deep aqua curtains, twenty feet high, now kept out the evening buzz. An envelope had been pushed under Lorelei’s door announcing the arrival of her dinner guests.

Lorelei gathered herself. She headed for the door, head tilted, swaying elegantly.

* * *

The boys walked eagerly over cobbles, but not eagerly enough to prevent Bill from yawning as Johan outlined the theory of the sixty-four practices of the Kama Sutra . A woman who gained mastery of all sixty-four crafts was respected, took her place in a male-dominated world, and became known as a ganika. Bill told him to shut up, but Johan kept the word on his lips.