suits with small trunks. Others sat on the benches around town, considering the club of other old guys doing the same for thousands of miles in every direction. They sat alone, or with a contemporary or a grandson, to whom they repeated exaggerated tales.
In the mornings, the smell of the town’s two bakeries pervaded avenue and nostril. The smells of the late afternoon were of steaming vegetables, infused with roasting meats and paprika from open windows. The Pavlovian clink of cutlery made the children’s mouths water.
The long Argona days gave way to nights of dimly lit taverns, couples kissing in the alleys, and wet cobblestones, to be steamed dry by the morning sun. There was none of the danger of the big city, and if that left the locals a bit naive, then they were more than a little happy. There was an honesty and refreshing plainness to the people, and pretentions were spotted sooner than a degenerate, hungover Austrian count with his fly down.
February 12, 1907
It was his thirteenth birthday, and in the morning he had been playing chess against himself, thinking of talking to deer real or imaginary, and pressing his nose into English literature. Yet he had been unable to fully relax.
He spent his birthday afternoon on his language homework, a thousand words on any subject he chose. He was racking his brains for inspiration, and repeatedly kicking his ball around the garden, when two turquoise butterflies playing tag flew past his nose. He went inside, picked up a pen, and began to write.
One amazingly beautiful creature, many different, unrelated names in different languages, words, all equally charming in their ability to describe it, and all so VERY different.
Mariposa, papillon, butterfly, Schmetterling, borboleta, farfalla, babochka, kupu kupu . . .
The butterfly may well be unique in this characteristic on the planet—not just in the animal kingdom, but in the sphere of the spoken word, Johan Thoms said to himself. He said many things to himself, for his father had taken him to one side as a boy, and with a seriousness Johan could measure in his mind, told him that the man who shows off his intelligence without justification is the same braggard who boasts of the size of his prison cell.
A trawl of Johan’s university library years later would reveal that of the four hundred languages sourced there, no two words for “butterfly” bore any resemblance to each other, not even in such close cousins as Spanish and Portuguese.
“The only commonality is in repeated syllables, meant perhaps to display the symmetry of that fine creature. In Ethiopian, he is the birra birro, in Japanese, the chou chou, and among the Aborigines either the buuja buuja, the malimali, or the man man.” (A very young Johan Thoms made this observation way before a certain Mr. Rorschach thought about boring us rigid with his diagram.)
Johan noted, too, that butterflies always seemed to be around whenever he thought of them. He entitled the essay “The Butterflies Flutter By.”
He was a weird little lad. And, without doubt, a time bomb.
Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid.
—William Cowper
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.
—Boswell’s Life of Johnson
September 1912
Johan Thoms packed up his books in Argona. At the age of eighteen, he had been accepted at the University of Sarajevo with the help of a scholarship—a major shaking of the kaleidoscope for young Johan, one might think, but not really. In Sarajevo he was only an hour from his childhood comforts, and he went rushing forward into dusty libraries while clinging to the past, returning at every opportunity to the Womb of Argona (a phrase he also used jokingly to refer to his mother). His determination to enjoy the present seemed to be dogged by his worry about the future and, more specifically, his desire to please his parents. He tried repeatedly to remind himself of his own theory of the Universe, and to live in the present. He tried to tell himself that what was done was done, that what will be was within his own control, and that there was no God to punish him for present, past, or future deeds. Within these seconds, he found peace of mind. However, it would take only somewhere between a fragment of a conversation and the distraction of a passing sparrow to lead his mind astray, and he would have broken his calming promise to himself.
* * *
Chess and soccer finally conceded to books.
Johan’s love of literature had been grounded in summer afternoons in the school glen reading Dickens with his favorite teacher, upon whom he had developed a crush at the age of ten. The class dissected English classics under the apple blossom trees, which in spring were whiter than the students’ bleach-white shirts. Johan was then rarely seen without a scabby novel or a yellowing library newspaper. Often he disagreed fiercely with what he read. When something made sense, he would slowly close his tome, his thumb keeping his spot, and ponder the newly found truth.
In his university years, he adopted the same technique for things with which he did not concur. Finally, differing opinions received more of his attention than those confirming his own often-stubborn beliefs. (Conversely, history professors claim that Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler read only books with which they already agreed, giving them an even more distorted vision of the world.)
Johan also stumbled upon a method of recording every required academic (and nonacademic) detail to memory. When his brain could take no more, he would stuff his face with vegetables, seeds, and legumes, pass a massive stool, and by this vacuum, create room for new knowledge. His theory was given extra weight when, at the age of nineteen, he read that Martin Luther had invented the Protestant religion while facilitating an extremely satisfying evacuation of his bowels. When he read The Hound of the Baskervilles, he was stunned to discover that Sherlock Holmes himself noted (on the subject of his Baker Street flat being thick with tobacco smoke), “I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.”
Johan took three seconds out of his life to imagine the fictional English demigod in a tiny fictional WC, a fictional shadow cast by his deerstalker hat, worn at forty-five degrees for the fictional duration of his ponderings.
Johan snapped back to reality as the word deerstalker scuttled through his brain. For what was he himself if not an erstwhile deerstalker? He wondered where his old pal Deer was now, and then asked himself if he thought he was normal.
He shuddered.
* * *
Johan Thoms found Anton Chekhov interminably dull and depressing, but knew that the old Russian had every reason to be down.
The French, he concluded, were far too pretentious, but then, like the rest of civilization, Johan didn’t gravitate toward them as a people anyway. Victor Hugo and Baudelaire were excused. When Johan read of a trial over the publication of Madame Bovary, Flaubert too found favor. He was granted special status when Johan read the judge’s summing up: “No gauze for him, no veils—he gives us nature in all her nudity and crudity.”
Anything banned or censored found its way onto Johan’s dustless shelves: Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Moll Flanders, and, latterly, Candide.
Goethe, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Mary Shelley, Keats, Andersen, Zola, Yeats, Marlowe.
He worshipped Darwin for debunking God’s good book. Johan Thoms even shared