Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.
—Confucius
1958. Sarajevo.
Johan’s writing, sporadic through Blanchita’s early years, began to gather steam once more. There would be no immediate return to Stanley Rex-Foyle however. Instead, Blanche picked up a thread from her first novel, almost three decades before.
In the Dragon in Chains series, Blanche tells the story of Ming of the Red Mist, a military officer forced into early retirement by the loss of a kneecap and an eye, and Qi Chu, the renowned Saintly Abbot from the White Cloud Monastery. The unlikely pair meet in the hills outside Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in 1898. Their train has stalled and they are forced to overnight in their carriage. They become firm friends after they discuss at length their shared love of (the much-quoted) Confucius and snooker. They travel on to Peking together and plot their futures.
There the following spring they open a small, luxurious, very expensive, and somewhat secretive hotel called Typhoon Hill, which is to become the favorite haunt of visiting ambassadors, dignitaries, presidents, prime ministers, princes, and kings, and famously to host the Peking Summit on the lawns in its walled Xing Garden.
By this time, Ming and Qi Chu are the purveyors of the land’s finest unadulterated opium, and they introduce (or reacquaint) many of the guests to her charms and delights.
Dragon in Chains is a term used to describe the urge to satisfy one’s addiction, which, in this case, is wonderfully utilized by our heroes to set the world in the direction of a Nirvana and a Shangri-la where war and inequality are actively discouraged and our leaders, it would seem to a confused onlooker, in unison start to act like reasonable, rational, caring human beings.
Dragon in Chains: How Opium and Confucius May Yet Save the World, Part One went to the ever-reliable Tobias Kilz in Ludgate Circus, and sold out across London bookshops almost immediately.
It was dedicated to LR, as was each of the subsequent books in the series. A fuming Dorothy Parker would not be seen for days afterward. The publication of this volume prompted a single powder-blue envelope with a New York postmark. In it, Lorelei expressed her utter delight at this mischievous, revolutionary, even angry side of Blanche. It made Johan smile to know he had not totally abdicated his responsibilities to her.
The book was received as “decades ahead of its time” and “superbly militant and deliciously subversive” by Mr. Archibald DeWitt-Vultura of the Manchester Guardian. Of course it was, though the review had been penned from a well-intentioned and comfortable Cheshire asylum. The column had been heavily edited down the road in the grubby city, but Archie had squeezed in some Baudelaire which the censor had not the heart to cut. “Laissez-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps l’odeur de tes cheveux.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Miss de la Peña continued to ponder how, if absinthe, guilt, and stupidity had brought her down, then opium, deep breaths, and intelligence might yet save her.
More volumes and literary acclaim followed. Meanwhile, she tried every day to remember Ming’s Confucian wisdom.
“Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.”
* * *
Johan kept his wireless on. People have been known to learn languages by keeping a radio on during the night. Leave on Süddeutscher Rundfunk through two years of gentle slumber and it is feasible that one may converse with the good folk of Stuttgart as one of their own. Well, Johan kept up-to-date with his trail of unique destruction in very much the same way, via the BBC.
Yugoslavia (literally “the land of southern Slavs”) had turned to Tito and communism when the Ustase were hounded out, and Moscow gripped the whole region. Stalin (harboring the enmity and distrust of capitalism from the Johan Thoms–inspired Treaty of Versailles) had turned his back on the West amid the seedlings of a new war (the BBC was calling it a “cold war”). Communism was the new threat. The communism of the Soviets and the Chinese even conceived a bastard baby in Hanoi. The Chinese were mobilizing. They limbered up by slaughtering tens of millions of their own. War kicked off first in Korea, and then came the horror of Vietnam. Clashing ideologies flourished in rice paddies, surrounded by fat snakes and pissed-off spiders. Another few million for Johan to endure and file away.
American paranoia about communism spawned the evils of modern-day U.S. foreign policy—the CIA with their fingers in Iran, Chile, Peru, Iraq, throughout the fifties, sowing seeds of revolution and destruction of anything remotely resembling a democracy. A few more million.
* * *
In early 1963, Elena died from pneumonia. She was ninety-four. They buried her next to Drago in the old gardens, which were soon to be a mass of varying blues once again.
Johan sobbed, too, for the first time in his life. Now quite the young lady, Blanchita held him closely, protecting him, as they had done for each other for the past seventeen years.
A few weeks later, Johan accidentally set fire to the old house after having fallen asleep at his typewriter and knocked over a flickering church candle. Blanchita had seen the smoke on her way back from the village. The upstairs was gutted, but Blanchita was still able to live comfortably in the downstairs.
Johan had already moved some of his old things into the shack, where he now isolated himself from the world. Some old books, his typewriter and manuscripts, his wireless, a kit bag, an old Schneider’s suit, a sublime paperweight carrying just five words, letters, an empty bottle of cologne, old sepia photographs, bits and pieces. He was repatriated with his old globe, which had played its part in starting this whole saga.
News kept coming through from the BBC, opposite his old room at the Langham. More deaths in Vietnam. The Cultural Revolution in China. Genocide in Cambodia—Year Zero and Pol Pot. Johan could trace the conflicts fought around communism back to the Treaty of Versailles, and hence the Great War, and hence himself. Up the road in Hungary, deaths of children from Russian bullets. East Timor. Iran. Argentina.
All this continued to permeate Johan’s consciousness overnight out in the shack. The months slipped by with the occasional visit into the house to rant or to sleepwalk in the nude. Blanchita could sometimes hear the expletives from his pain from across the expanse of bluish flowers at dusk or dawn, or during the nights.
Blanchita was the exquisite best of Catalina, Cicero, Drago, Elena, and Johan. She was fire and music; scarlet and turquoise; crimson velvet and pirates’ blood. From her evenings with the Chess Club, she easily made the transition into schoolteacher, in which position she mainly taught the piano. She was still a teenager, but she appeared to be far, far wiser. Her skill had already alerted the University of Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Chamber Orchestra. Blanchita played regularly with them, without pay, always with her eyes closed to accentuate the delights and the definition of the music, and in honor of her dead, blind father. The orchestra toured regularly, including internationally, but she did not want to leave Johan. She insisted that she was happy to remain an amateur, and always explained that the word came from the Latin verb for “to love.” However, Johan demanded that she play a minimum of three recitals outside of the country each year, and being a Young Hooligan at heart, Blanchita simply had to respect her elder. This little girl would be very much seen and heard.
* * *
The exposure allowed her to fully soak in the wondrous delights of the world from the comfortable base camp of six-star hotels, for the orchestra had of late provoked the interest and generosity of a mystery benefactor. This cushion of luxury inevitably led to love affairs and to the breaking of many young men’s hearts. She gladly dipped her toe, and enjoyed each of them for what they were. She was very Spanish, after all.
* * *
The mass of blue disappeared. It returned. It went again, as legions of new readers read the words the end in Dragon in Chains: How Opium and Confucius May Yet Save the World, Part Two.
In England, Tobias Kilz and the Ruben-Wolfram Press had become supremely rich from the scribblings of Miss de la Peña. Kilz could now fund many new young writers. The plentiful earlier royalties soon seemed insignificant in comparison to those from the Dragon in Chains series, for opium and Confucius were indeed a supreme combination. I guess there is a deep seam of interest in having the world saved, especially by such magnificent methods as those employed by our fine, unassuming Eastern heroes, of the Red Mist and the White Cloud Monastery.
Blanche took exciting and enthralling liberties with plotlines, while Ming and Qi Chu quietly, and to an impressive degree, pushed their luck, too. Meanwhile, governments covertly and overtly searched for Blanche, in attempts to charm her. In other days, the possessor of Blanche’s typewriter might have sweated profusely at the thought of such pursuers. The irony was not lost on him/her when he/she received coded updates from his/her protector, Tobias Kilz. The publisher was no longer of Ludgate Circus, thanks to the kerfuffle started by his wonderful scribe. Kilz had been inspired by Conan Doyle, Holmes, and latterly Archibald DeWitt-Vultura and actually done it; yes, he was keeping bees in Sussex, though he was at pains to point out to anyone who inquired that it was not against their will.
Dragon in Chains continued with Ming of the Red Mist and the Scented Squadron of Mata Haris (1965).
The title of Who Shall Slay the Bothersome Elite? Perhaps Qi Chu and I Shall (which was translated into many languages; almost as many as there are words for “butterfly,” pondered the author, minutes before she saw a pair coquetting above the blue wilderness) was stenciled and sprayed, etched and painted, whispered and yelled across the burning cities of Europe (and beyond) in 1968 (and beyond).
The revolutionary sixties then shot their bolt as subtle subterfuge, high-waisted suits, sweating and handkerchief-dabbing Sydney Greenstreet types, tinny gunshots and femme fatales returned in Qi Chu and the Hurricane That Lasted for the Illegal Fortnight (1971). The book was closer in spirit to Key Largo than it was to the Brigadier. Bacall, Bogart, and Barrymore would all have approved. The “Illegal Fortnight” is a rowdy and unruly time in Peking, when the city is struck by a weather pattern never before seen. No sane person thinks to leave his or her residence during the violent storm; one has to remain where and with whom one was when the tropical cyclone landed. Cabin fever takes hold, and large swathes of the city resort to total reliance on the opium that is delivered by the only two men with the courage and the knowledge to take on Mother Nature. Ming of the Red Mist and Qi Chu, the Saintly Abbot from the White Cloud Monastery, are able to sense safe corridors in the tornado, as well as when the epicenter (which swirls around the metropolis for twelve long days, refusing to leave) is directly above them, allowing them secure passage in whichever direction the malicious and devilishly persistent storm is heading. Many thousands of Pekingese would feel a lull in the winds before the politest of knocks on their door. Shortly after the departure of the pair, bliss would be inhaled and ecstasy would beckon. Blanche thought of that blue rose, just out of reach. Once people are liberated, apocryphal and exaggerated tales of the duo’s exploits during the siege spread.
As the title suggests, 1979’s The Torrid Fibonacci15 Sequenced Orgy on the Untarnishable Xing Lawns of Typhoon Hill exquisitely pushed boundaries of taste and decency, incurring the censors’ wrath in many of Kilz’s territories. He could have kissed them, for his presses rarely rested in supplying public demand, nor did the translators, who sometimes risked their freedom and that of their families. May the blind and determined fools generously continue to determine such dubious tidemarks for us, Kilz happily concluded of the censors. The numbers involved in the Fibonacci bacchanalia are not only vast, but supremely arranged to mathematical perfection, as if Ming of the Red Mist and Qi Chu, the Saintly Abbot from the White Cloud Monastery, are conducting their orchestra from above with a perfect plan view and the minds of calculus professors in a stream of consciousness. Qi Chu waves his baton. It is a thing of beauty.
Those who were lucky enough to witness the superbly debauched events at Typhoon Hill either are purged, rise to power within the party, or are still out there somewhere, spinning out of control and flying the flag for the cowards who just read or heard of their exploits.
Meanwhile, a whooping Archibald DeWitt-Vultura met the release of the Fibonacci hot potato with the following exhalation of camp honesty in the Manchester Guardian.
CAREFUL, MY DEAREST, MOST IMMACULATE BLANCHE.
They, the miscreants in our midst and in your crosshairs, usually end up crucifying your sort. If I were able to knock the nail into my final hand, I would gladly die on the cross next to you, but only after having taken down as many of those who would deny you as possible. Excuse my lower Danish, for it is indeed quite rusty: THE BASTARDS!
I fawn for no other, and never have. Never shall.
Come and make friends in person, for mine are dying off at such a rate these days that I am actually quite shocked, and invariably delighted, if they make it through luncheon. They have promised to let me out if I stop the lilac graffiti. I have conceded to this wish, for I dream of stumbling into you in either this or another realm, you High and Dark Angel of Mischief. Together we shall slaughter the intolerant.
Archibald.
DeWitt-Vultura was out and looking for Blanche, as harmlessly as one might imagine.
The royalties were routinely sent by Mr. Kilz to Blanchita and to the two accounts of the Young Hooligans’ Chess Club. He had researched the recipients of the monies, and had guessed that a fine (albeit eccentric) philanthropic spirit was behind Stanley Rex-Foyle et al.
* * *
Johan’s physical appearance began to concern Blanchita at times. She devotedly delivered his breakfasts, lunches, and suppers on the stroke of nine, twelve, and six. Many remained untouched. Johan started, at age eighty-five, to resemble one of those poor bastards in the pictures from the liberated death camps, which he believed that he had personally instigated. His large skull was now old, a home to sallow, heavy bags under his eyes, a full head of scraggy gray hair, gray stubble, and gray beard. He shuffled around the cabin like a lifer in prison. His eyes, though, remained as azure as those glorious waters off Split he’d looked into back in 1914.
He wrote more prodigiously but his thoughts became increasingly scattered. It would be another seventeen years before Kilz received his penultimate package from Blanche.
The Year the Opium and the Marigold Failed (1996) warned of a vicious world without heavy drug use. Movie deals were offered to Blanche via Kilz, but there was never a chance that the rights holder would agree to the bastardization of her work. Perhaps if Gene Tierney, Sydney Greenstreet, or David Niven had been attached to the project, things might have been different. She preferred to remember the tobacco-yellowy silver screen at the bottom of Porlock Hill during the war.
In 2001,
God’s Troika of Stardust
When Ming and Qi Chu Entertained the White-Kilted Brigadier in the Smoky Gallery of the Mirrored Buffoons
An Unretractable Apology
was published. Blanche’s heroes all came together in the style of one of those monochrome classics from the thirties, where the Wolfman meets Frankenstein meets Count Dracula; Chaney, Karloff, and Lugosi to boot. Naturally, Stanley Rex-Foyle is hugely drawn to Ming of the Red Mist and Qi Chu, the Saintly Abbot from the White Cloud Monastery, for, although Stanley had not tried opium or read Confucius (that is, at least not until thirty pages in), he is an avid and reasonably competent snooker player. It is on the green baize that their friendship is formed. The Brigadier wagers his belongings in games with the pair until he has only his white kilt as leverage. He then loses on the black ball, due to the numbing and quite blissful effects of the narcotics. He is stripped naked after his defeat, but wakes two days later, fully dressed, kilt and all, with his wallet stuffed with banknotes. Ming of the Red Mist and Qi Chu, the Saintly Abbot from the White Cloud Monastery, have spent those two days in the Gallery of the Mirrored Buffoons, laughing almost continually through a plume of thick opiatic smoke. At midnight on the second night, Qi Chu tells Red Mist his ultimate secret: how it was he who drove a car on June the twenty-eighth, 1914, and how his momentary lapse of concentration started the Great War. And with it comes an apology which remains unretractable to this day; unretractable for it was accepted by his friend with a gentle, manly kiss on the forehead. And that was the last we would hear of our three friends.
Blanche had no qualms in stealing her opening line for the final story from a German16 whom she had always much admired. It was a warning which remains as apt as ever.
Don’t rejoice in his defeat, you men.
For though the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
We all knew this was an adieu; and a fine one at that.
* * *
He had convinced himself that there was a way back in time, a vortex, a portal, a wormhole in the space-time continuum, a loxodromic magic carpet ride through the decades. He would stare at the objects around his shack, mementos of his life which he was convinced were his passport. He was determined to return to 1914 and do things—well, just one thing—differently. There had to be a way. The vellum tomes, the letters stamped from Vienna in 1913 and 1914—something would transport him back if he concentrated on it hard enough at the right moment in time. There existed a mathematical equation which would give him the formula, the key. He scribbled for days on a yellowed heavy-stock, embossed tablet of writing paper lifted from the President, back when things had been good. Integration, differentiation, heavy mind-bending calculus. Sigmas and dy/dx’s.
He pictured himself reappearing as a youth in the old library. The still-cream-bound volumes of the Kama Sutra were spread out in front of him on his study desk. He imagined looking down at his veinless youthful, smooth hands, those of a young man, a boy, a student, flourishing, thriving with the world at his feet. He looked up and caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass casing of the philosophy section, a boyish complexion, a creaseless face, lean-jawed and handsome. He breathed in the smells of youth: of dewberry on girls’ necks, of ylang-ylang in the summer air at the Old Sultan’s Palace, of gardenia on his pillow. The window was open on a spring afternoon, and he heard the sound of a piano. It was the Gymnopédies again. He forced himself to reappear there. To squeeze through that vortex and to go back, in order to put things right.
His concentration was broken by a rat scuttling over his foot. He was back in the shack, old, creased, mad, smelly, decaying rapidly, not long for this world (he was past his one hundred and ninth birthday).
“Fuck!” he blurted. “I was nearly fucking there. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. F . . . U . . . C . . . KKKK!”
Agony overtook him, and he passed out onto the floor.
* * *
He came round a few hours later, with a phrase on his lips.
“I am the Resurrection.
And I am the Life . . .”
But whom was he trying to convince?
He had been responsible for two billion deaths and had touched the lives of everyone on the planet, so why could he not do this one single thing? It made no sense. Instead of turning time back, he was hurtling forward through it at great speed, for he had now been back in his homeland for fifty-seven years, and forty of those had been spent in this shack.
Johan heard a noise behind him again. A face peered in through the cobwebbed pane, framed amid the mass of lilacs, speedwells, and ceanothus. But no Blue Rose of Forgetfulness. Not quite yet.
It was a face he did not fully recognize, but it resembled someone he thought he knew. He beckoned the visitor in through a door which had never been locked.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” Johan said with an English accent which would have been more than acceptable on the World Service. “Please come in.”