What’s the use of worrying?
It never was worthwhile,
So, pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag
And smile, boy, smile!
—George Asaf, “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag”
Johan had heard that if one were to melt down the Eiffel Tower but keep the same base measure, it would be just three inches high. He was still preoccupied by this fact, and by the practical applications of shrinking and stealing the tower, as they took the train from the filthy Gare du Nord. They headed to the northern coast, to the equally scabby, rat-ridden port of Calais.
Within months, the messy, bloody evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force would be in full swing down the road at Dunkerque, but on this day, the Channel could not have been more serene. In Paris, Catalina had managed to procure a wheelchair for Cicero and a nurse’s uniform for herself.
Across the English Channel on September 1, 1939, the airwaves of the BBC (television, not radio) had ceased to broadcast for fear of its VHF signals attracting the Luftwaffe.
Walt Disney’s Mickey’s Gala Premier had been the final broadcast before the scrap had begun. Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Clark Gable, and Mae West made guest appearances at the Chinese Theatre as Pegleg Pete kidnapped Minnie Mouse. The poor critter was predictably rescued by Mickey. The hero squeaked Disney’s vocal tones and was soon smothered in grateful kisses from Greta Garbo. Roll credits. Then the homely BBC voice-over of Mrs. Jasmine Bligh bade farewell to the nation. Then silence.
(Until June 7, 1946, when the same Mrs. Bligh returned with a calm and very English, “Now, then. As we were saying before we were so rudely interrupted.” This brief statement was followed by, of course, a Mickey Mouse cartoon.)
The one-legged soldier and his nurse had no problem entering England. Johan faced only minimal fuss once he brought out his yellowed papers from 1914. Other passengers were herded into a pen by the docks in Dover, anxious but relieved to have clear, blue water between themselves and the German Wehrmacht. By late spring, that same army had taken Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark; it had already annexed its own lands from the Treaty of Versailles, the Sudetenland, and a now meek, powerless, and obliging Austria. By June, they would have added France.
Johan’s movements in escaping war often had left him just a weak buffer away from a front line. Since Sagres, he had found no peaceful enclave to escape the horror which he had personally set in motion. Once again the only talk, the only thought in the minds of the British, was of war, of defending the “sunlit uplands” and vanquishing the fermenting evil in the east. There would be no escaping the reminders, so in order to at least minimize them, he resolved to banish the trio to the distant English countryside. They became evacuees.
Once again, Johan’s natural instinct was to head west, which led first to two lazy nights at the Savoy on the Strand (where, in the foyer, he doffed his cap to a gaunt and yellowy face which he later recognized to be Eric Arthur Blair). From there, they went to Paddington station in West London, then out to the North Somerset coast of the Bristol Channel and the rolling moors of Exmoor. Johan knew the geographical lay of the land from his books, as he had when he and Cicero had first landed in Italy. The Baskervilles had finally drawn in this old crackpot, this fine and silly deerstalker.
Their next stop was the quaint seaside town of Porlock, with its neat station gardens, lovingly manicured and kept by the stationmaster, old Clarence, who, when not trimming the lawns, was to be found scrubbing the frames of the advertising signs persuading all to nibble on Fry’s Chocolate or to drink hot beefy Bovril. It was Clarence who told them, upon their arrival, that they could get clean, inexpensive rooms above the Duke of Wellington public house. The red-and-white stripes of the barber’s pole, the bandstand with the band all off to war, the red postboxes were all so English. Polite, welcoming chaps in deep Brunswick-green army uniforms or the grubby gray-blue of the RAF frequented the pubs and chatted to rouge lipsticked girls under lamplights on foggy nights. Those lamplights were to be extinguished soon, when the Blitz scorched London, Coventry, and Plymouth in the summer of 1940.
All feared that invasion was imminent. This led Johan into trances that lasted for days on end. Cicero got hold of marigolds, but Johan had now become almost immune to the stuff. With instantaneous news from the wireless, his paranoia and psychosis overtook him. He could not maintain eye contact, and shuffled like he was packed with amphetamines. He could sleep no more than fifteen minutes without tossing, turning, yelling. He spoke of going home to Argona and Sarajevo, how things would be as they used to be. He spoke of Bill Cartwright as if he were still alive, of an American girl he used to know and a book he still had to return to a university professor. The number of deaths under the rubble in Britain, the casualties over the Channel and around the world, meant that Blanche was not at her most prolific. The scale of events had stifled her, as had their travels. She would soon return.
Johan sensed again that someone was trying to find him, and for protection, he purchased a shotgun from a drunken farmer for three of his English guineas. He was looking out to sea, daydreaming of Lorelei, when the gun fired, blowing a chunk of his right thigh in the direction of Minehead.
* * *
As Cicero negotiated a bed for Johan at a fine old hospital up on Porlock Hill (it resembled the setting of a Somerset Maugham novel), it occurred to him that life had come full circle. Cicero had made sure the hospital was first class. A wireless was placed next to his bed, where he would try to remind himself to listen instead to classical music.
“If this music can survive, endure, and hold her shoulders back, then so can I!” he would say. “Music, brigadiers, and marigold. Music, brigadiers, and marigold.”
Cicero visited every day, and sometimes at night, often with Catalina, who was now showing public displays of affection toward her Roman friend.
One day, almost at dawn, Cicero awoke in his chair next to Johan’s bed. He quietly wheeled himself away from his pal (after once again putting a heavy crucifix in his hand). He recalled a night more than a quarter of a century before when the two of them had stolen away into the darkness, to give Cicero his unexpected life.
As he wheeled himself out, it was still dark, but only just.
He sat, surrounded by ladybirds and dwarfed by the majestic twenty-five-foot wrought-iron gates of the old hospital (soon to be melted down to make munitions), high on the hill above the picture-postcard seaside town, and he wept, loudly. Soldiers marched down in the town to catch the dawn train to Bristol and then to London, then to Lord knows where. The rhythm and the stomp of soldiers’ boots and the optimistic whistling mixed with a chorus from some young lads, still full of youth, going to do the right thing, overwhelmed him. The song was a well-known one of the day, and Cicero had heard it many times in the last few months.
Catalina had been waiting in the gardens. She put her hand on the back of Cicero’s head and saw, when he lifted his sorry face, that he was crying. She didn’t know if he was weeping for his pal, for his own sorry legless, blind state, or for the poor bleeders down in the valley, marching off to a premature death in a foreign field. In truth, it was for all three.
Catalina started to roll his chair down the road that led to the town. She hummed along until they reached the last line of the troops’ ditty, when she joined in herself with a quivering.
“And smile, boy! Smile!”
This time, Cicero couldn’t smile.
from “The Unpublished Diaries of D. Parker”
The journey from the Pyrenees along the Côte had been smooth. We arrived in Marseilles. The trail was cold, as was I. As would be the revenge when it was served. It had been a few months now. We knew this was not going to be easy, though I knew for my fellow passenger little else mattered. A Faustian score was to be settled, and I did not want to witness it. More than anything, I did not want to witness it. It would have turned my stomach if the descriptions of the intended merciless and brutal acts upon him were to be reenacted.
She meant business, all right. Lorelei was like that. I guess she really fucking loved that fool.
I had left her in Cannes. She had heard from a rude and disgruntled black-jack dealer at the Bel Otero Casino in the Carlton Hotel that Johan had indeed been in Monte Carlo. Personally, I had had enough. I loved Lorelei like a sister, but if I never smell another Frenchman, it will be too soon. I went back to Paris, then on to New York. I told her she was cracked in the head. That photograph of him, which she had taken from the saloon doors of a grubby tabac in Dubrovnik, never left her purse, it seemed, in her search for him. His face was recognizable. His head remained unusually large for his body. He was dressed as if for a bracing cold outside. Unsightly, foul locals in the background appeared to be mocking him. The other picture was a close-up in what appeared to be the same bar. He held a schnapps in his right hand and a pack of stubby French cigarettes in the other.
That man—Johan fucking Thoms—was unmistakably the cowardly wreck I had encountered on the steps of that bar on Ernie Hemingway’s birthday in July ’37 somewhere in the Spanish foothills. How dare that wretch Thoms bastardize my poems! The worm! Indeed!
Lorelei Ribeiro was very close to finding a quite oblivious and lost Johan Thoms. She was walking back to him, but on a road that was perhaps moving even more rapidly in the other direction.