The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things.
—Oscar Wilde
June 17, 1913. Dawn.
Johan Thoms rose with the sun. Both had their shoulders back, chests and chins out.
He did, contrary to William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright’s advice, wash. He put on a short-sleeved white shirt, black waistcoat, beige trousers with black braces, new olive-hued socks, and black brogues. His hair was side-parted, oiled but showing glimpses of blond from the sun. His face had an even youthful summer tan, and he added a subtle hint of El Capitán cologne, merely for politeness. He could easily have been going to church as he closed the door of his neat dorm behind him. Such tidiness would soon be a thing of the past.
He was greeted on the stroke of seven by an aging chauffeur named Helmut Grockenberger, who had white skin and a shock of red hair, and who exuded the scent of garlic. Helmut Grockenberger was propped up by a shiny new Packard.
It was a glorious morning. Small boys walked lively dogs, and medical students headed for the dusty shade of libraries, for there was no summer respite for them. Less focused rogues stumbled home with bow ties undone and drooping.
The car rolled smoothly out of the city limits. Johan felt unusually calm, comforted by the beauty of the morning, the luxury of the car, and the good things that were happening to him. The only problem was his father, but as insanities go, Drago’s even seemed weirdly wonderful. He noted that he needed to send a telegram to Argona to let his parents know of his progress. Perhaps he could even surprise them with a visit.
The journey was swift. The unusual tranquillity that had descended upon him relaxed him further. The trick would be to feel like this every day. He knew that this was within his youthful grasp.
Glide gently . . .
The car came to a halt on the gravel at the front of the Moorish splendor of the castile, the windows of which were taller than his house in Argona. The glass-paneled doors at the top of the twenty stone steps opened and out stepped Kaunitz himself, with a huge, welcoming grin, as if he had not seen his new best friend for three decades. It had been just a few hours.
It was past eight.
“Let us break our fast! Do you like sausage?”
Holy Mary, he didn’t take long, did he? Johan thought.
“I do,” he said aloud. “And I am famished.”
“Superb! Come, follow me. We should eat in the glen. It is simply heaven before nine.”
* * *
In the orchard, Wilfried pulled a chair out for Johan. He was almost polite. After a breakfast of fresh fruits, delicious meats, juice, and coffee, the Count and Johan strolled through the grounds, observing the manicured lawns and hedges, the centuries-old stonework. The Count explained the quirks of the manor. As he did, he seemed to calm down. The innuendo dried up.
“I wanted to thank you for all your help, Count,” said Johan eventually.
“Kaunitz, please. Less of the formality, now we’re friends.”
“Fine. Kaunitz.”
A comfortable pause followed. And so as the formality was lost, there seemed in direct proportion to be less of the predator in Kaunitz. The Count told Johan the history of the Kaunitz family all the way back to Salzburg in the early sixteenth century. They reached the lake, by the deep forest, where they sat on a recently scrubbed stone bench. Johan glanced into the woods. A deer peered back. Johan decided to ignore this.
At some point, Kaunitz knew that he had to divulge the precise nature of the General’s work. He had concealed it so far, to entice the boy into his lair. Johan was there now.
“Right,” he began. “I spoke with Müller at length. Here is the arrangement. Potiorek is overseeing maneuvers, as a show of strength to the Serbs. You will be needed to chauffeur dignitaries and their wives around as they come into town, mainly from Vienna and Salzburg, but also from Berlin and Munich. Discretion is vital, and your hours may be irregular. Müller has spoken to your dean, who vouched for you, as did a Professor Tiberius Novac. You really are well thought of there you know, young man. You will need to share responsibilities with drivers already at the Konak. Franz Urban and Leopold Loyka are longtime members of Potiorek’s staff. You will be their backup, and you will do as they ask. This Friday will be your induction. Do not arrive even one minute late—you can’t imagine what they are like sometimes. But I know you will do just fine there, and you won’t let me—or yourself, or your family—down. You have an open account at Schneider’s, by the way, where we got the suit yesterday. This is my gift to you. I want you to indulge yourself, so I have instructed old man Schneider to treat you as he would me. God help you.” He broke into the previous Kaunitz for a second, arms flailing.
He recomposed himself. It was peeving to him that he could not control himself for more than an hour. He had been doing so well, too.
A lump appeared in Johan’s throat. The Count was actually just a lonely man in his ivory towers, desperate to be needed and loved.
“Do you have any questions?” Kaunitz asked.
“None straightaway, but I am sure I will have.”
“Good answer. I like that about you. Nothing seems to worry you, and you take your time. You will go far, I think. I cannot thank that grumpy old skeleton with antlers enough for bringing you here as a friend.”
Johan smiled, and felt no fear as the Count slapped him softly on the shoulder.
“Come. Let’s go relax inside the house. Today is Johan day! I have some wonderful art to show you. I want you to treat this place like it is your own. I would not want you to come here and feel inhibited.”
“Well, that’s a tough one to turn down!”
“Good. I am glad that this is sorted out, but I do mean it, you know. These are not hollow words. I like to stand by my promises.”
“I can see that. I know that. And I appreciate that.”
Johan spoke to Kaunitz as a friend and an equal. Kaunitz heard Johan in the same way.
They shook hands and held each other’s gaze. Johan spoke first. He was keen to do this, in order to give meaning to the deal they had just struck as friends.
“Tell me about London!” he demanded, with not a “sir,” nor a “Count,” nor a “Kaunitz.”
“Crazy, crazy place. Especially right now. But not as crazy as Marrakech, or Constantinople.” Kaunitz rolled his eyes as Johan tried to imagine the bacchanalia being replayed on the Count’s inner eye.
“What is it about London?”
“The history, the writers, the power, the architecture, the people, the freedoms, of a kind.”
They disappeared toward the manor, walking as relaxed friends would.
* * *
By noon, Kaunitz had expertly opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon without the help of Wilfried. He and Johan sat in the shade at the front of the southern wing, on deep-cushioned chaise longues.
“Tell me about you!” Kaunitz inquired, though it did not make Johan feel uncomfortable. Quite the opposite. He spoke for an hour, relaxed as could be, until (while on the subject of Bill Cartwright) Kaunitz couldn’t take it anymore.
“Oh, I DO love English boys, so very proper,” he said. Kaunitz had not before approached the taboo of his homosexuality. They laughed.
They were soon on the third bottle. Kaunitz was proving to be wonderfully independent in chilling and pouring the Sekt without Wilfried.
“What sort of girls do you like?” the Count wondered as he refilled the glasses.
“Blondes, dark girls. Whatever. Right now an American. Why do you ask?”
“Never you mind, you nosy scoundrel. Can’t a new pal be curious? Prost!” Their glasses chinked.
“What sort of boys do you like?” Johan found himself saying. Then he waited like a bullied boy, expecting the full weight of his opponent upon him in seconds. He cringed.
This would be the litmus test of their new friendship.
The Count spat out a palateful of finest Dom, choking. He looked in Johan’s eyes for a second, then exploded into raucous laughter.
“You are the best! Oh, my boy. If only, if only!”
Johan breathed a deep sigh of relief. The friendship had found its equilibrium.
“You stay here. I need to talk to Wilfried about a couple of things.” Kaunitz patted him on the back, shaking his head, still in disbelief at the turn of the conversation. “Oh, and I will answer your wonderful probings when I return, Johan Thoms.”
Kaunitz disappeared into the cool of the vaulted banqueting hall, laughing. Johan entered a daydream, thinking how he and Bill might spend their days if they lived in such a place.
Kaunitz had been gone for ten minutes before he swept back out exuding a sense of expectancy.
“Now, where were we? Ah yes, your naughty probings. Well, to be honest, I like boys like you. But fear not. You are my friend, and I hope you feel I am yours. So, let’s get that out of the way. I also like many other types of boys. I am a bit of a brute, when it comes down to it. ‘East is east and west is west, and this is where they meet.’ They gather here from Chicago to the Ottoman. It is the scourge of the idle class, I am afraid. But I never venture to zones where others do not want to venture. I am a polite brute.”
He reached for a gold cigarette case.
“We have some crazy parties. Wilde was always invited and continually threatened to accept. But alas, that never happened. God rest his harassed soul, the poor, poor genius.”
Wilfried appeared and gestured to the Count.
“Everything is arranged, sirs.”
Johan noted the plural with intrigue. “Anything of which I should be aware?” he asked.
“All in good time,” the Count answered. “The impatience of youth. Life should be savored, for there is no going back at the end of the journey. Relish the trek, for destinations can be so dull. Just look at Belgrade, for heaven’s sake. Glide gently, thus forever glide, my boy!”
Johan shuddered, as if his grave were being danced on by the future.
Kaunitz lit a long pipe, which exuded a sweet-smelling vapor that made his eyes roll and glaze. He explained how the vessel was made from bamboo, rimmed with silver, stuffed with palm slices and hair. It was fed by a bowl of clay, in which Kaunitz had melted globules of opium, held over an oil lamp’s flame.
He was midflow, extravagantly quoting an English poet, slowly and thoughtfully pacing imaginary boards:
“On with the dance!
Let joy be unconfined,
No sleep till morn,
When youth and pleasure meet,
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.”
Thus he announced his love for the world, madly puffing on the pipe and flailing more slowly now.
Johan interrupted with an involuntary blurt. “Do you have some of that stuff for me?”
Silence.
“I mean . . . Please?” he added.
“OH MY GOD!”
I’ve done it this time. I have crossed the line, Johan thought.
“OH MY DEAR GOD!”
Johan began to apologize, but had little chance of getting a word in, even considering the Count’s influenced condition.
“I am so rude. I just thought you didn’t . . .”
“Erm . . . I don’t. But I am not stupid!”
“I want to have your children, Johan Thoms!”
Pause. Long pause.
“But I haven’t got any!”
A further second passed, before they both folded into uncontrollable laughter. When this had subsided, Kaunitz rose to enter the shelter of the hall, beckoning Johan to follow. “Are you sure about this? Feeding you this was really not on my agenda,” he said over his left shoulder, now with the caring attitude of an elder brother.
“I am not stupid, but neither do I want to die stupid,” Johan said.
“My word! What a delicious surprise you constantly are. And I don’t want you to die stupid either. This has to be of your own volition.”
“If the Queen of England, Byron, and Sherlock Holmes smoked the stuff, then I shall take it in my stride.” Johan realized that the champagne was making him slightly giddy.
“There is no such person as Sherlock Holmes, Johan.”
“That, Count Kaunitz the Fifteenth, is not the point!”
“I guess you are right!”
“Now, you’ll have to show me how.”
“Easy.” Kaunitz opened a silver snuffbox and emptied a pile of its brownish contents into the contraption. He cackled to himself as he lit it for Johan and passed it over.
“Just don’t tell your mother, please.”
The smoke hit Johan’s bloodstream and he felt his eyelids grow heavy. The Count produced a fine cigar and a cool, sweating flute of Dom.
“Willkommen, mein Freund.”
When Johan felt the initial nausea pass, it was then his turn—his facial musculature lax—to babble, which he did, for fifteen minutes, mainly on the subject of bonobo chimps. The Count felt it only fair to sit back and indulge the youth. The monologue continued until Johan heard car engines in the distance. The noise closed in until the clatter of the chip gravel was louder than the hum of the cars. Several doors opened, feet on loose stone, several doors closed, with a clunk, clunk, clunk. Voices, foreign voices, those of women, girls, laughter and giggles.
Wilfried appeared from out of the sunlight, and introduced their female visitors. Kaunitz was keen to see who had been summoned. Two beautiful creatures, touching six foot each, with shocks of blond hair, porcelain skin, and the clearest blue-green eyes paraded past Johan with saucy smiles. They stopped and kissed each other. A dusky-skinned vision from Persia then approached Johan and placed her full lips on his, leaving them there. Her eyes half opened as the rest of her frame remained still, then her lids fell again. A narrow gap in her front teeth pulled Johan’s lip toward her. She confidently revealed a gold ring containing a sapphire stone in her right nipple as she pulled away, glancing down at Johan’s bulging lap.
An ebony duo inspected Johan as they marched by his flank together. They were perfect specimens, with high cheekbones and taut rare eyes, suggesting a skin wound drum-tight, making them susceptible to being pleasured.
The Count nodded. He clapped and signaled a start to the festivities. The girls turned their starved desires along with their hands and mouths on each other, and the two ebonies turned to Johan.
“This is Johan Thoms,” the Count said. “Please him, ladies, for he is my friend. If you please him today, you please me. He is now your friend. I will return shortly,” he announced, with an impressive authority, as the harem set about their wonderful duties.
“And you enjoy, Johan, my friend,” he added. “I love you, like a brother. Bis spaeter.” He clapped his hands again and retreated, now closer in spirit to a revered, respected Caligula.
The thrum of a harp approached from down a hallway, and a table had appeared, holding a large tray, lined immaculately with row upon row of small glasses of absinthe.
Billy would never believe this.
* * *
The bacchanalia continued until, as a naked, happy group, they met the next sunrise outside the great hall. Generations before, carnivores had here torn into flesh at banquets celebrating ancient customs. Now it was the sweat from lithe nymphomaniacs that stained the knots of the tables, to a mystical backbeat of Sanskrit and Aramaic yelps. The party cosine twisted back to sine.
Kaunitz appeared once more, to lay an asexual and avuncular tender kiss on the forehead of each of his guests, including Johan, before retiring once more to Lord knows where, to do Lord knows what, with Lord knows whom.
Johan felt a glow of happiness. He was untouchable, for this is what his life had become.
* * *
Throughout the proceedings, which had seen daylight disappear and return, nothing had felt grubby or shameful. Johan now rested upon a plateau on which he was indestructible. He was in a true state of glorious joy. Nothing could touch him other than a dozen groping hands, including his own.
More importantly, he had a new friend: a lonely soul who had just needed a pal and an equal.
Three of the girls made their way to their chambers. One duo, however, had won a toss of a forint piece to take the grinning bigheaded boy with them.
They all climbed the twelve-foot-wide staircase slowly to the first floor. Two of the girls pulled Johan into a huge room with high windows. They were protected from the day’s glare by thick cream curtains as they collapsed onto what seemed to be the world’s biggest and softest bed and drifted, intertwined, into a blissful slumber.
* * *
The next thing Johan knew, it was late morning once more. All three seemed to stir at the same time. Their bodies had taken pleasure and slept in synchronicity, why not wake together?
So they all bathed together, tumbling just once back into fucking with the slow pace inspired by the laziness of the approaching noon. They entered a vortex, into the realm of outer-body experience. The rest was an ecstatic blur with no concept of time; an ancient version of the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness.
* * *
A naked Johan, sated and bathed, looked out from his baroque balcony to see the lone figure of Kaunitz down by the lake, on a stone bench. Johan threw on a heavy robe and headed down, without a rush but with a definite purpose.
It wasn’t until Johan was ten yards away that Kaunitz spun round. He bore not an ounce of the sadness his posture had suggested, merely a huge grin.
“Well?” he said.
“Not what I expected when I left town!”
“Not what I was expecting to provide. If you were not such a relief, a revelation, a breath of fresh air in my life compared to the idiots whom I once called acquaintances! I am glad it turned out this way. As long as you are all right and promise to continue to be you, I will always be here for you, Johan Thoms.
“But now,” the Count said, “we need to get you back to civilization. You have a date, my friend.” He winked wickedly. “It’s a good job you are such a slip of a lad with potent powers of recovery! Let’s not make such a habit of it, but please come back soon. You are always welcome.”
“It’s a deal.”
“And now, tell me more about this Billy friend of yours.”
They laughed. Then they hugged and wandered back slowly to the manor, where Wilfried had prepared the Packard.
Thirty minutes later, after one last cup of coffee, Johan, in his civvies, climbed into the back of the automobile to leave paradise to return to the city.
He turned around for one last look, to see three balconies of nymphs, some seminaked and scrubbed, some still naked and sweating, but all waving to their new chum.
“Well, I guess Ahab got his fish.” Kaunitz smiled.
Johan nodded (pondering what life must have been like all the time for Kubla Khan and the Old Sultan, over in the decreed pleasure dome of Xanadu, or down the road and up the hill at the Palace).
“We hope we welcome sir again soon,” said Wilfried as he closed the car door. He afforded himself a half smile.
* * *
Alone in the back of the Packard, Johan blurted out, “Johan Thoms! You lucky bum! You bloody lucky bum!”
They were just a mile from the campus. Johan was still organizing his thoughts, when another verbal volley left his lips.
“Thank Christ. Am I glad I washed my old chap!”
The driver sprayed spittle onto the windshield.
Did I just say that or think it? Johan wondered. Then he smiled to himself. If he had said it, it would have made the driver’s day.
Johan bit his lip to suppress a giggle. He thought of the last twenty-four (or so) hours. With a whole solar revolution in the company of five rabid, rampant nymphomaniacs, each seventy-two degrees of rotation had brought him fresh honey and a heavenly creature of diabolical desires.
“Balls to the outbursts, you rotter,” he reassured himself, loudly and carefree. “The madness suits you well.”
Looking only marginally disheveled from his exertions, and as yet unruffled by guilt (for he still did not know that he was in love with Lorelei), he observed from the car window elbow nudges and sly looks from the throngs of curious eyes around the faculty. He alighted from the Packard, spoke briefly with the driver, who was seen to doff his hat in Johan Thoms’s direction.
Johan Thoms marched off toward his dorm and yelled to the skies:
“Blasphemers and infidels. Degenerates and heretics. What a joy!”
These were turning out to be strange days indeed. That same day, William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright, discovered that he had inadvertently become a father back in Yorkshire. The child was a boy. Bill Cartwright’s only son was to be called Ernest, and he would take his father’s surname nine months later when he left his mother’s bosom for the idle comfort of the Cartwright family and their ancestral home in Huddersfield.
Ernest Cartwright. My grandfather.