To give birth is a fearsome thing: there is no hating the child one has borne even when injured by it.
—Sophocles
It was Johan Thoms’s birthday, in February 1946. Catalina, seven months with child, was walking Cicero before breakfast. Elena had set off on an early-morning walk in the opposite direction to buy bacon from the nearest farmer, a mile away. The three of them left the house at the same time.
As she walked back from her stroll with Cicero, coming down the short but steep hillock on their usual lap around the property, Catalina slipped on black ice. Right onto her belly. She lay screaming next to a ditch. The trench was serenely littered with early, yet very dead white orchids, themselves having caught cold, surprised by the night frost and preserved in their ice. The orchids were the last things she saw before she blacked out.
Cicero rolled down the hill in his wheelchair into the freezing brook, cracking his head on a rock. The would-be father was left unconscious, the crown of his head in the frozen ice, warm blood pouring into the crystal-cut waters.
A short while later, from his warm slumber up in the house, Johan heard Catalina’s distant screams. At first, he placed it as part of a dream, a former lover’s climactic shrill giving him an early-morning erection. He stirred to recognize the actual source, and a quite different emotion. He ran down the stairs and out into the cold February morning of his birthday just as naked as the day he was born, in that selfsame house on that selfsame date.
Nature’s weird symmetry.
* * *
He collected her in his arms and took her toward the truck.
Catalina mouthed one word as she peeked out above the parapet of her inevitable and pending coma: “Cicero!” She gestured with rapidly glazing, rolling brown eyes and the slow flick of a finger. He helped her into the passenger seat. The keys were always left in the truck, so off they drove. Johan was still naked. Catalina was hemorrhaging from her jackknifed center. Johan saw Cicero’s wheelchair as they swept down toward the bottom of the lane.
He found his old pal next to death in ice-cold water. His stump stuck out skyward. His black hair collected ice from the brook, and the freezing north wind coagulated the frozen blood in the thick mop on his head.
As Johan picked up Cicero and sat him next to Catalina in the front of the truck, his eye caught his cape in the back of truck and he threw it around their shoulders.
Off he sped toward the city, desperately pulling at the rudimentary dials on the dash for some heat from the engine. Outside, the crap and the mud on the windscreen of the van was an inch thick in places, and made it almost impossible for him to see out on the potholed road. The wipers did not work.
“Put your arms around him, keep him warm,” he urged in panic. “And yourself.”
Catalina did not speak, nor did she move.
When they arrived at the hospital less than twenty mad minutes later, his greatest friend was dead. Catalina was unconscious, her midriff a mass of clotted and still-weeping blood. A pair of orderlies, outside smoking, took the injured pair inside. Johan Thoms stayed motionless outside in the truck. Still unable to sob. The cape had fallen from his friends inside the car as they had been transported in.
The hospital was poorly equipped and did not really deserve the name. There was a nurse, however, who cared (of course), and Catalina was placed in her care. Johan recalled those nurses, those angels who had shown him love and generosity of spirit through his life. They always appeared to be there when they were most needed. And they were needed now.
* * *
The wipers were still not working. He cursed the truck.
“Fucking piece of shit,” he blurted.
He threw the cape around himself, raising its hood to protect his identity and himself from the cold. He crept out of the truck’s cabin and around into the back. From the pile of farm tools and digging implements, he improvised. The farmer’s old scythe was the nearest he could find to a windscreen wiper.
Johan Thoms—the Angel of Death—walked to the front of the truck, which dripped blood and had just released a corpse or two (or three) from its front seat. Outside the morgue-ish hospital, naked from the shins down in a long black cape with the hood up, carrying a bloody scythe, he started to clean the windscreens.
At the busy windows, the collected ill and dying and the inmates of the attached asylum gasped. They saw only the Grim Reaper, the Eternal Footman, the Spoiler of Worldly Mansions, the Dark Minister of the Graveyard, who, still faceless, caped and holding his scythe in his left hand, slowly crawled into the driver’s seat and smoked the single cigarette which lay on the dashboard. He sat up, turned the keys in the ignition, and drove off. When Catalina ever so briefly came around, she had to be sedated.
This time, Johan did not run. He parked around the back of the hospital and went inside. He sat with Catalina and held her hand. She drifted in and out of consciousness, though Johan continued to speak to her regardless, fondly. From the ghostly pale complexion of her exquisite face, framed by the deep red blood on her forehead, cheeks, and chin, he suspected that she was falling away rapidly into the unknown realm now occupied by her beloved blind soldier. A young doctor attended to her with a vigor beyond the capacity of a loved one. On the stroke of eleven, Catalina died. Johan screamed a guttural and desperate scream that could not have been matched by those grim of mind and loose of faculty down the hallways in the asylum. Then his raw yells were matched by those of a newborn, a new life released from the confines of a dead mother’s womb. A girl.
This unreasonably dark cloud might yet reveal a lining of unfathomably bright silver, though at that exact moment, Johan could think only of his lost friends—Catalina, the girl in the tatty blue dress, and Cicero, that great senator. They were runts, rescue cases, and as rich and as intriguing and as astonishing as they had been, both had finally overstayed their welcomes.
Having seen the sorry, shambolic state of Johan, a nurse offered to take the child and look after her, either temporarily or on a longer-term basis. Johan was having none of it. He reached out for the baby in the style of the Reaper, arms seemingly extending a preternatural length to scoop back his loved ones’ spawn.
This girl had lost her mother but had taken from her with that last breath a gift of vitality so rich and potent that she would burst upon Johan’s gray world as soon as his veil would allow it. Some might say that she even lifted it all by herself.
* * *
New York City, September 1, 1945
My dearest J.,
It seems our son was lost one week before the Japanese surrendered. Our grandson looks just as his father did at the same age. One day, I hope to tell him about his father, and, of course, his grandfather. I can write no more.
Good-bye, my darling.
Always,
Yours, Lorelei xxx
Johan took the letter from Ernest.
“This was her final one. I never saw her again. I have never met my grandson. Now you know why I must return. Why I shall soon return . . .”
He smiled. He had to be thinking of a June night in Sarajevo. Or of that smoky old bar in Dubrovnik.