He had a persistently troubled frown, which gave him the expression of someone who is trying to repair a watch with his gloves on.
—James Thurber
They collected their belongings from the hotel, hung the crucifix on the rearview mirror, filled the tank, and found the warming open road out of Segovia and toward the ancient walled city of Avila, their next stop. Here among magnificent churches, and fine examples of Gothic, Renaissance, and Moorish architecture, they found a peaceful sanctuary, fresh paella, and fine vino.
They did not stay long. Johan planned to take Cicero and Alfredo as far west as they could possibly get, away from the turmoil across the continent. They trundled on, though at no great pace, and soon entered Portugal at the historic citadel of Badajoz. They then headed toward Lisbon and the Atlantic, before veering off to the south to avoid civilization.
On a windy day in early October ’14, they reached the last outpost of Europe. Their Land’s End. From here, there was no “going over the top.” These lucky bastards had found a safe trench.
The fishing village of Sagres, the End of the World, hugged the most southwesterly tip of Portugal. To the south baked the warmer waters that had spilled out of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar. Beyond were the deserts and the Moors, the myths of Morocco and North Africa.
To the west swelled the steely, gray depths of the Atlantic, destined to become a nautical tomb for many in the next three months, the next three years, and the next three decades.
* * *
One early evening shortly after their arrival, they enjoyed a bottle of port and fresh sardines in a local café. There, Johan struck a deal with a local joiner-fisherman-shepherd-lothario in his early thirties by the name of Pedro. From Pedro he rented, for pennies, a small farm holding on the edge of the village. He had trusted Pedro’s fun-loving and uniquely green eyes from their first meeting. No deposit had been required.
“Let’s break bread and shake hands on it,” said Johan outside Pedro’s single-room dwelling by the harbor. For Cicero, any friend of Johan Thoms was a friend of his.
For Alfredo, it was easy.
“Oh, him!” said Johan. “Two tomato-laced sardines and a bowl of icy water and he is anyone’s.”
Their new abode was on the dorsal fin jutting into the Atlantic, less than a quarter mile from the village in the direction of the sleepier hamlet of Vila do Bispo.
Pedro spoke a few words of English, but not many. The village had seen its fair share of friendly, often wrecked (in both senses of the word) fishermen from the British Isles and their navy cousins over the years. To speak in English was acceptable; to mutter a syllable in Spanish, however, was punishable with a good hiding and a dunking in the Ocean. The hatred for the Spanish ran deep after centuries of torment. The British held disputed Spanish land in nearby Gibraltar and therefore shared a common enemy with the Portuguese. So Johan and Pedro decided that Anglo-Saxon was to be the newcomers’ conduit as they adapted to their new locale. Moreover, Pedro, a philandering, testosterone-soaked, swashbuckling, fish-hunting woodworker, knew of a local maiden, Ismeralda, a schoolteacher of magnificent proportions yet sadly unholy looks, who kept an English-Portuguese dictionary on her mantelpiece. Pedro had seen it while making love to her from behind (for it was the only way with her) one balmy night the previous year. He would arrange a haphazard meeting with her outside the school (which he had avoided for twelve months), knowing full well he would be made very welcome indeed in her roomy dwelling.
Within a week, and with malice aforethought, the gang had their book, and their group’s communication flourished.
Cicero later noted to Johan, in fine English and with utmost seriousness, that Pedro’s conquest had been “quite, quite ghastly.”
* * *
Johan coped well enough in company. Lonely moments, however, brought on episodes.
An old lighthouse sat a mile from the harbor. Its solitary purpose was to guide ships in and out of the world’s busiest shipping lane. There, way above the deserted Zavial Beach, Johan sat watching many sunrises and sunsets. He often stared down at the raging waters, wondering if he would be in less pain should he join the murk two hundred feet below. Would he be settling some Faustian debt? Or would he become one more unnecessary statistic, which into the bargain would leave a young boy and his dog alone in a foreign land? He was, of course, a coward. This is why he was where he was. So he would return to his car and take a swig of marigold or, if the mood took him, some local port of supreme quality. Port was in ample, cheap supply and would often soothe him more than the marigold, which Cicero and Johan had decided now to grow.
Cicero’s health had continued to ameliorate at a remarkable rate. They made an effort to speak the local dialect of Portuguese, initially with blunt yet worthy efforts of obrigadinho, peixe, or vila. Their spongy young brains soon wrapped themselves around the tongue. With the help of the dictionary and the notorious Pedro, they were made increasingly welcome by the traditionally wary village folk. These were fisherfolk, who survived on the trust of their comrades, their solid collective at sea, and not on outsiders from Lisbon, who invariably shafted them on roads and taxes, military drafts and schools. An outsider would, and should, and often did have it tough there in Sagres. However, as Johan had a sick young child and a dog in tow, the locals, with their uniform of weather-beaten faces, fishing caps and bleached shirts, sagely nodded their approval. This was all despite Johan’s relative wealth and the nice car, which he made an effort never to clean nor to drive too fast. He left the crucifix safely on show. It worked well with the locals, especially when man and boy made a show at church every week, with a well-trained Alfredo sitting politely outside in a bow tie. The villagers thought them mad, but that was all right.
When Johan did utilize the car, he would pick up locals on the side of the road. Before long, even full canteens would find two extra seats for the strangers and some bones for their canine sidekick, who, oddly, received a similarly courteous welcome from the mutts of the village.
Pedro put the word around that if there were any sickness, his friend from the east (for this is all the locals would understand) had a potion, which he would happily administer for free. The plant was now flourishing in pots around the foreigner’s shack. Far from this upsetting the local medicine man, the local quack welcomed the respite, though the sturdy village folk rarely complained of any ailment anyway.
Every day they would see Johan up on the top of the cliffs staring out to sea. They kept their distance to start with, unable or unwilling to communicate. They knew to leave him to his wanderings, though they still did not know that the horror engulfing the world, with millions of lives soon to be lost in a previously unmatched inferno, was, in his mind, all his fault. While Johan’s state of mental void continued, the rest of the continent was caught up in a kaleidoscopic cataclysm that afforded to no one else the luxury of any such limbo. The word limbo meant nothing to the poor sods in the Highland Regiments, the Welsh Fusiliers, the Bedfordshires, the King’s Cavalry, the Green Howards. Nor, come to that, the Landsturm Batterie, the Bayerische 6. Landwehr, or the Pionier-Kompanie.
“All my fault.”
Soon there would be the horror of the Eastern Front, which would deliver more corpses to the mud, and more telegrams back to wives and mothers, sisters and lovers, than its western twin.
“All my fault.”
Then there was Turkey. Its apocalyptic slaughter ravaged lives and left widows by the thousand weeping, from Gallipoli to Wagga Wagga via Yerevan.
“All my damned fault.”
It would soon be impossible for Johan to hide from news coming across Europe, news of tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of youthful casualties. Huge swathes of Northern France and Belgium became quagmires of trenches, littered with twisted biplanes, bullet-holed helmets of all hues, corpses, and dead horses among the deadly green whiff of mustard gas. And was Bill in the middle of all this?
“God, it is all my fucking fault!”
* * *
One night, as the sun dipped once again to the west, Johan decided that he would not move from his spot until the sun rose from over his left shoulder the following dawn. Cicero and Alfredo found him by the lighthouse, shivering from the harsh Atlantic freshness.
After putting the orangey cure to Johan’s muttering lips, Cicero decided to finally, fully broach the subject.
“What is it, boss? Isn’t it time you told me what is wrong with you?”
Johan slowly turned round to see his young pal, who appeared quite alive these days. Considering Johan’s silence until now, and the silence that he would resume, a verbal release of perhaps five or eight minutes of one day, of one week, of one year was not such a self-indulgement rant. There was a silence for thirty seconds.
“I have not your courage, my Roman hero. I do not know where to start. Nor do I know where all this will end. I can see no end. All I see is death. All I see are the mistakes I have made. I see the faces of the people I have loved and who have loved me but who now must hate me but whom I still love. I see strangers’ loved ones lost, rotting somewhere in a blasted field. The children asking where Daddy is and when he is coming home. Sweethearts slumped on benches at railway stations with handkerchiefs, hoping each day, every day, for some lost moment, for a lost love from some sunny summer to return. Mothers waiting in cold kitchens for their flesh and blood to come home, but their flesh is now in one part of Belgium and their blood spilled across another. And it is way too late for them to replace the irreplaceable. The mothers’ wombs are barren and their time has gone. The unimaginable grief of one poor mother multiplied by a number beyond comprehension, Cicero.”
Cicero, unable to understand what Johan was talking about, indulged him, for he knew that this was more important for the moment. Johan spoke more calmly.
“I had everything a young lad could have wanted. Everything was just perfect. And yet I managed to transform it not just into nothing, like some sad fool would do, but into death, destruction, horror, and hell on the vastest possible scale. If there is one single thing to give me some sick solace, it is that I am the best at what I do, Cicero. I am the master of my dark domain, the ruler of my black art.”
Cicero was trying, but he was still not getting it.
Johan looked into the boy’s concerned dark eyes.
“This war is all my fault. You want to know why newspapers send me crazy, or the sight of a soldier or an old woman crying? Because I was driving the car when the Archduke was shot. I took the wrong turn. I could not reverse the damned car. I drove them into a street where those blasted Serbs were having a sandwich. A sandwich, for Christ’s sake! It was all over in less than a minute.”
And he snapped the middle finger and thumb on his right hand.
“If only I had followed the simple instructions, the world would be at peace. Hundreds of thousands of lives not wasted. I’m a mass murderer, but I didn’t mean to be. Mass manslaughter is not on any statute books in any constitution, for the obvious reason that no one would be guilty of such a ridiculous crime. One can kill someone without meaning to once. But a million deaths cannot be accidental. The lawmakers cannot square that particular circle. Yet yours truly did just that on their behalf! Congratulations, Cicero. You are friends with the world’s most prolific mass murderer.”
Cicero sat in stunned silence. Alfredo, too, lay motionless, his eyebrows twitching from left to right.
“I have tried to be good, to do good. Instead? Bloody mayhem. And now what is there for me to do, other than run? You have been the best thing to happen to me since. That day in the hospital when you befriended me has saved my sad excuse for a life so far, and for that I thank you. But this remains my burden and I must live with my actions. I have no one to blame but myself. I was surrounded by people who gave and gave, and I rewarded them with disappointment and shame. This is the way things are; nothing can change them now. They just become worse and worse in a maelstrom of shed blood and lost and sawn limbs. Tens of thousands of nurses hearing a million and more screams. Death rattles in foreign fields, boys and grown men in sludge. On piss-, shit-, and bloodstained mattresses, they yell their last breaths for their mothers across borders. They implore their help, beg their presence as they regress to infancy in the moment before they recognize the advent of their last miserable second. All my bloody fault, my young friend. Now do you understand?”
Tears streamed down Cicero’s still face, and he made not a sound.
Alfredo lodged himself under the urchin’s loose shoulder in a show of solidarity, a vain attempt to comfort.
“In towns and villages and isolated farmhouses for thousands of miles, doors remain open throughout the night, in the dumb, forlorn hope that a uniformed, unshaven figure will stumble through them in the depths of the night, and a mother or wife will find her loved one asleep in his favorite chair the following dawn. Extra places are set for dinner, but each evening, dessert is a lonely wail in the back garden, so as not to upset the young ones upstairs, clinging instinctively to their teddy bears, too young to understand why Johnny is no longer there. I have changed the world! I have touched the lives of millions. Millions of boys and men, whose final word in a trench in a foreign field or in a stinking hospital was ‘mother,’ which, if you were to see it just once, just once in your life, Cicero, you would think was the saddest thing you had ever seen. Think about it for a second. Well, this is millions. Bloody millions. And their mothers were not there for them. Can you understand this, my friend? I still do not think that I fully can . . . or ever will.”
Cicero put his bony arm on Johan’s shoulder. He moved his still-delicate frame even closer to his mate and held him as best he could. His kepi fell to the ground as its peak hit Johan’s burdened shoulder. Alfredo lay on their feet, trying to spread and to share an unspreadable and unsharable burden. Johan only stared out to sea.
They stayed motionless for hours.
Passing strangers would have presumed them a stone statue, a statue in remembrance of a unique friendship, with secrets abounding, of a sadness, a remorse, a loss, a waste impossible to comprehend.
It could be seen in their faces, even from the distant, dusty road to the old lighthouse at the End of the World.
* * *
Sarajevo, September 14, 1914
My dearest J.,
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts when thou are gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
Yours, with love, as genius unashamedly steals rather than borrows,
Lorelei xxx
P.S. I am pregnant, my darling. We are having a baby. You know that begging is not my business, so I choose my words carefully. Get here soon, my love.
Ernest handed the letter back to Johan, who dropped it back onto one of the large piles of others, for he now seemed oddly disinterested in maintaining their order. He had passed perhaps one out of every ten to Ernest to read. Some envelopes contained photographs, Ernest noted, and some letters were far longer than the ones he was being allowed to see.
There was a knock on the door. A lady of powerful beauty entered. She lived, it seemed, across the expanse of bluish rocks, in the house which was visible from the dusty and cobwebbed window at the back of the hermitage. Ernest thought Johan called her Bandita, which made her giggle. She handed the two old men mugs of coffee and plates of cheese, bread, and cold cuts of pork. She said nothing, but fondly stroked Johan’s head. She then closed the door behind her, and the old man continued his tale. Ernest noted that just as a single day in his story had taken many hours to retell, so longer periods of time (months and years) seemed to him to pass by very quickly, which according to his oracle, Johan, was very probably an indication that the days in question were all spent in a very similar fashion and that they lacked adventure, which pleased Alfredo. And Cicero. And, most of all, Johan.