The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms Read online

  —Luke 6:38

  February 1894. Bosnia

  Johan 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.

  Johan heard the vile twin curses idi u kurac2 and tizi pizdun3 for the first time that day, as Fleabag glanced up to look at Johan’s eyes, right, left, right, left, as if to double-check that the boy knew what he was doing. Young Johan rolled his eyes.

  Johan had placed his knights centrally, to offer control of the whole board before a forced exchange from Pestic. Each player was now left with only one.

  Pieces were now traded at a steady pace. Johan felt that if he had the choice of either position—his or Pestic’s—he would take his own.

  Queens made their way into the action.

  Pestic surveyed the battlefield, from a lofty height, in a scabby gray suit with bobbles of worsted around th
e elbows and collar. His chin shoved through white whiskers. His mouth was uneven, his lips were badly chapped, and his teeth leaned erratically, like brown tombstones. Greasy wisps of gray-and-silver hair grew randomly across his skull. His crown generously shed itself onto the back line of his pawn’s defense. This tall, bent, skinny wretch had clearly thrown his lot into the game he loved. His shirt looked as if some poor soul had tried to scrub it clean. His mauve tie was badly knotted, and was no longer at the apex of his collar as he returned again to Johan. He looked like he had lost a love, and had never recovered. His brown eyes, however, were clear and youthful, and did not hide the fierce intelligence behind them.

  * * *

  Only half a dozen boys remained.

  Old Fleabag now had to pull up a seat for each visit to Johan’s board.

  Johan sneaked in a castle maneuver. Fleabag followed. His clock ticked. Both clocks ticked, but Johan’s seemed to him to move in slow motion.

  Hmm, thought Johan. Flea by name, flee by nature . . .

  Johan’s neurons were firing as he offered an exchange which, when accepted, left the boy a pawn up.

  Johan consolidated with a centrally placed queen covering his outlying pieces.

  Everything was now under the cover of a compatriot piece. He had never before lined up such a defense (which by its very nature, was morphing into an attack).

  Cometh the hour, cometh the urchin.

  Johan spotted a trap, revealing an undiscovered check which left him a major piece up, as well as his pawn advantage. He then eagerly exchanged queens, to whittle away any remaining leverage from Fleabag.

  If the game had been halted now, Johan Thoms would have been crowned champion. He was way ahead. He (white) held a centrally placed rook, a white-squared bishop, a knight, and five pawns.

  Pestic (black) had four pawns, a black-squared bishop, and a rook.

  * * *

  Evening had arrived. Old Busic, the lazy school janitor and gardener, could be heard whistling out in the entrance, threatening to do his shoddy mopping tasks once the battle was through.

  The whistling broke Johan’s now iron concentration, and he looked up to notice that the gathering of parents off to one side had dwindled.

  Yet the crowd had added one to its number. She now stood next to Toothless Mico.

  It was his mother, Elena Thoms.

  Tears almost came to Johan’s eyes as Fleabag once again came to his table, the number of combatants down to just one, Johan himself. Another boy slunk off into the dusk.

  Her sparkling blue eyes were damp with tears—“wetter than an otter’s pocket,” she later admitted—which made them twinkle even more. Lazy old Busic, standing by her now, put down his mop and urged on the little lad with a slowly pumping fist.

  She had made it after all, Johan thought. She’d had enough confidence in him to know that he would still be alive on the board.

  Johan quickly regained his composure, but it was too late. Old Fleabag’s eyes were focused. He had to produce something remarkable. This he did.

  Black (Fleabag) played an inspired and sacrificial rook to h3, in a move that would have initially appeared like suicide even to seasoned professionals. Johan, left with no choice if he was to avoid a checkmate at h6, took Fleabag’s rook at h3, aligning his pawns on the outer flank. It was a price worth paying for Fleabag, who advanced his pawn to h6 for a check. Johan was forced to pitch his king back to h4, whereupon the ruthless old genius slid his now proud, erect bishop to f2 for an inspired victory.

  The unbeaten grand master never came to any of the schools again. He shuffled off to the hills to be fed on by fleas until his death, hastened by a malicious Kaposi’s sarcoma, whereby the fleas passed on the baton to their counterparts the worms.

  Elena had been there long enough to see the grand master crumple in turmoil as the game slid away from him. Her own flesh and blood had sat opposite, shoelaces dangling inches from the dusty boards. Johan had ratcheted up the old man’s misery with remarkable nonchalance. As the minutes had passed by, the old guy had stooped lower and their respective caricatured outlines had become more pronounced against the yellow light at the far end of the hall. Elena witnessed a swift exchange, a change of posture, and, ultimately, a handshake.

  Johan did not want to let his mother know how close he had come to winning. She must not think her presence there had put him off. (It may also have been a hint at an almost frantic desire to please his parents, which some might have seen as unhealthy and perhaps even pathological. The frenetic nature of this adorable trait led Johan to miss breaths when he saw his parents’ smiles.) And anyway, if Pestic could pull off a victory from that position, Johan realized, perhaps nothing would have prevented his own brave defeat. He had, however, lasted longer than any other boy; and he suspected that she loved him as much as he loved her.

  At checkmate, Johan jumped down from his chair, and discovered that he had left the wrong shoe untied. He landed, leaving the old guy scratching various parts of his fading cadaver. The lad tied his lace and staggered toward his mother and Toothless Mico. An overexcited Busic tried to meet him halfway. Johan sidestepped him almost with grace, and stumbled on toward Elena, who picked him up and squeezed him.

  Toothless Mico took them back to Argona. The boy later remembered being happy as he fell asleep in the cart on the dirt track. He woke from time to time with images of a chessboard on the lids of his eyes. When he opened them, the image was transposed onto the stars in the clear night sky.

  Mars was his rook, the moon his queen.

  He saw an army of a thousand pawns in the celestials, which made him wonder why he was allowed only eight.

  Three

  Serendipity’s Day Off

  It’s too soon to tell.

  —Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, when asked by Henry Kissinger if he thought the French Revolution of 1789 had been of benefit to humanity

  It was serendipity’s day off,” insisted my grandfather Ernest. “By all rights, Johan Thoms should have been blinded, if not killed, as a seven-year-old.”

  June 1901. Near Sarajevo.

  Johan’s boyhood nightly routine had been an odd one.

  First, he would close his eyes and mentally check off each of the continents on his father’s huge ancient globe, which Drago had requisitioned from the school where he worked. The spherical atlas held center stage in the living room, its pink, yellow, and red landmasses enveloped by the blue oceans. The globe also held special status for the boy, as it was larger (however marginally) than his own head. He would spend hours in bed remembering its countries, its capitals, and its seas. As time went by, he increased the difficulty of his nocturnal examinations, testing himself with the capital of Ceylon, the neighboring bodies of water to the Yellow Sea, or the longitudes of Costa Rica’s coastlines. His spongelike brain soaked up everything.

  After this initial task, he would transport himself mentally to the side of a deserted rural road. In his reveries, a leaden sky threatened a premature dusk. In a lay-by sat an empty mustard-yellow carriage. The horses had been released. This abandoned cart marked the part of the forest where he would meet his friend. Young Johan then had to stand absolutely motionless next to the wood, and stare in until his pal arrived. This would complete his nightly duties.

  His chum was a stag deer, and possessor of the land’s largest antlers—fourteen blades, to be exact. Some nights Johan would lie there for hours, staring at the vivid canvas on the inside of his neuronized eye, awaiting the appearance of the friendly, beckoning deer thirty yards or so into the thick forest. Other nights the deer appeared within minutes, even seconds. Johan had no control. He could only get there and stare into the dense green and brown. But after a glint in the eye and a nod from his imaginary buddy, he would be allowed to enter a restful, deep sleep. If he did not obey these rules, he believed, the world would be nudged off its axis.

  * * *

  Johan had been visiting the same spot in his mind every night for a coupl
e of years when his parents sent him on a holiday to the countryside. Rudimentary tents; appalling food with grit and burned grass, cremated on campfires; mildly disgusting ditties sung around the campfire every night by the older boys.

  On the final afternoon, the group was taken to a local landed estate, where various wild species roamed. It had been a tinderbox of a summer, the hottest in living memory. Ten minutes after arriving, the group was led off to a crumbling canteen at the edge of a lake to hydrate themselves before the afternoon’s exertions. That is, everyone apart from one melon-headed, blue-eyed, stick-legged youth who had spotted one of the most common species in the park, a deer. Johan was in a trance. It was his friend!

  At last, he could meet him and talk to him, as he had wished for every night since he could remember.

  No one saw the boy stagger off in the opposite direction to the rest of his group. He stumbled in the field’s divots and potholes, like the town drunk leaving the tavern at midnight, toward his buddy. Mothers the world over would have picked him up, wrapped him in cotton wool, and stolen away to the hills with him.

  His target was minding his own business, eating grass in the clearing with several other deer. Johan had never been so excited. How come they had not told him he was going to see his friend today? He reached the beast with unusual confidence and speed, and greeted his pal.

  “Hello you. I have come to see you. They never told me I was coming; I don’t know if they told you.”

  The deer stopped munching for a few seconds and eyed him with mistrust.

  “I’m on holiday. I guess you’re on holiday from the woods, too. Sometimes I wait hours for you, but I want you to know that I do not mind,” Johan said.

  A couple of the other deer had now raised their heads.

  “Do you like it better out here than in the woods?”

  No answer.

  “Your antlers are bigger than usual.