Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.
—Sir Winston Churchill
During their stay at the Langham, Johan talked at regular intervals (every hour or so) about going home to Sarajevo. He developed the stare of a madman, and his episodes increased in frequency and exposed his madness to the innocent general public. Naked night traipses (oddly, very similar to Catalina’s own father’s) were his specialty, as well as relieving washing lines of their pieces.
Once, he was found naked in some opium den in Whitechapel, steadfastly refusing to smoke any more of the narcotic after having hot ash dropped onto his now red raw groin by a bucktoothed African goof called, of all things, Scottish Paul. The other smokers were too smashed to care about anything as dull as nakedness. The small Asian man on the front door was more interested in a half-crown tip.
On another occasion, in the Red Anchor pub in Covent Garden, he had left the tap bar, drunk, to piss in the gents’, when the darkness fell, in a rare afternoon episode. Lost and confused, he wandered the labyrinthine corridors of the West End building. Fifteen minutes later and no closer to his release, he opened a door and walked straight out onto a stage in the middle of a period production of The Importance of Being Earnest. He settled on a mauve chaise longue for the majority of the third act, much to the befuddlement of Lady Bracknell and Algernon, and to the utmost enjoyment of the audience. He arose toward the play’s close, passed wind loudly, and sauntered down the central aisle and out into the glaring afternoon sun. It was not the first time in his life that he left uproar in his slipstream. He (or as the reviewer called him, Pepper’s Ghost, which refers to a Dickensian theater trick of making objects or people appear and disappear) received a fine, if slightly tongue-in-cheek, review in the following day’s Times.
Johan also sleepwalked one night along the tracks through the underground system, ending up at Vauxhall station on a drizzly dawn with no clothes on. The stations were still kept open, ever since the nights five years before when a hundred thousand plus would sleep beneath the city to escape the Luftwaffe’s fiery bombs and V-2 rockets. Compared to today, those were innocent days, when sabotage by one’s own populace was an unimagined and unimaginable event. Johan was found by a team of those unfortunate hair collectors (known as fluffers) who had (and still have) the horrific task of trawling the tube network during the night for dry hair, dust, and other waste which, particularly in the summer, becomes a fire hazard. Two old, stooped Cockney characters kindly led Johan out of the tunnel between Vauxhall and Waterloo. All they were able to help with sartorially was a large plastic bag or two, which they were using to collect their hairy haul. Back at the Langham, the concierge, broadcasting absolute horror from every frown line, snapped his fingers for an underling to engulf Johan in a blanket.
* * *
In clearer moments, Johan loved to take Catalina and Cicero to breakfast at the Wolseley, by Green Park. Catalina happily went along with the boys’ plans, still delighted by everyday surprises to be found in new towns, new faces, and new words. She was content to be soaking up every new inch of the world outside that piece of scrubland in the hinterlands of 1930s Spain. Like her two friends, she was living on borrowed time; her sell-by date had been the day her village was crushed by Franco’s tanks. She was quite a wonder, with a scarily sharp brain and a seldomly utilized scowl. Her dark eyes, sensual swagger, and blemishless Spanish skin were enough to stop strangers in their tracks, especially in the pale-skinned northern climes of Anglo-Saxon London.
* * *
Within a few weeks, they received notification from the Yugoslav ambassador that they could now return to Sarajevo. The travel documents were delivered to the Langham while Johan was enjoying a breakfast of kippers, English muffins, and Marmite. He then read the Times, spending a full half hour on the obituaries. (“It’s where all the interesting people are to be found these days,” he used to say.)
He had also carefully torn out a clipping from another paper for his own wallet.
A BRIEF ENCOUNTER
Last evening’s Oxford Literary Awards Supper was made infinitely more bearable by the shortest acceptance speech in their controversial history; made even swifter and less bothersome by the nonappearance of the winner, as intriguing and perhaps revealing as that event might have been. After last year’s dreary, syrupy, and tear-ridden effort (which was dragged out for eighteen uncomfortable minutes) by Miss Fanny Reiker (almost as frightening in person as her prose is on the page, though I would call it “typing,” not “writing”), we were thankfully treated to just sixteen syllables, eleven words, four clipped sentences, one telegram.
Heresy, blasphemy, and bad taste shall endure. Stop. Thank you. Stop.
No! Thank you, Blanche. And if bad taste should prevail, then the Daily Telegraph shall not count you in its unwelcome number. Vive le Brigadier!
Mr. Valentine R. Beauchamps,
Daily Telegraph
Johan was going to miss this country and this city. They had been in London only a very short time, and in England for less than five years. If it were not for the desire to return to his parents and to see old Kaunitz, he would have happily stayed in England, and in London, for good.
Johan was now fifty-one. He shuddered when he thought of how different his parents would be. Kaunitz, too. Would they still be alive? Would they really not blame him for all the things for which he blamed himself? Would they really not see his trail of horror?