Chapter Twelve
Klemens was born in the year 1895 in a central district of the city of Zagreb to a once affluent family of declining fortunes. His brother Karlo was two years his senior, and clearly favored by their father Osvald, despite often being a source of embarrassment to the family. Osvald had, in feckless youth, frittered away most of what was left of the family fortune and married Jelena, a poor girl he found singing with a tamburitza orchestra in Vojvodina. Klemens inherited Jelena’s love of music but found the works for piano of Liszt and Smetana and Wagner’s Ring Cycle more revelatory than any folk or Gypsy song.
Osvald tried his best to convince his sons that service in the military was a sound career choice. Klemens had some reservations with increased Russian aggression and the specter of war falling as a dread shadow over the Balkans, but no alternatives immediately presented themselves. Osvald still had enough influence to have Klemens and Karlo enrolled in an officer training program. In June of 1914, Klemens accepted an officer’s commission in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Two weeks later, the Archduke of the Empire, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, plunging the world into conflagration.
Klemens’ unit was assigned to the Italian front. Fighting was fierce, and soon Klemens could remember nothing aside from the smoke, mud, and metal of a gray world at war. After several months, Klemens received word that Karlo had been injured in battle on the Russian Front and discharged from the army.
Back at the Italian front, Klemens performed his duties efficiently, but on one fateful occasion, when his unit received orders to advance, Klemens froze. His batman prodded, cajoled, and cursed him, but he would not budge. Klemens, for his part, was aware on some level of his batman shaking him by the shoulders and screaming in his face, but Klemens was far away, in a land untroubled by explosions, flamethrowers, poison gas, and roaring motors. He was in a fantastic country of verdant forests and swift sparkling streams, populated by giants, Rhine maidens, dragons, dwarfs and Valkyries sailing across a cerulean firmament astride winged stallions.
Ultimately, the batman was able to guide Klemens to his feet, while basically taking command of the situation and guiding the troops’ advance into enemy lines. Not a word was spoken about it afterward. It was as if it had never happened. The battle was deemed a great victory for the Empire, and Klemens was decorated by his superiors.
When the Great War ended, Klemens returned to his home in Zagreb, where Karlo now lived with Jelena. Osvald had managed to drink himself to death during the wartime years. Klemens and Karlo formed a social club of veterans of the Great War, which would meet on a monthly basis at a local tavern. At first the meetings proved cathartic and healing. As the years passed, personal and political differences between certain members arose, not the least between Klemens and Karlo, and meetings were often marked with acrimony or sullen formality replacing camaraderie as memories of the war receded into the past. Eventually, the club was no more than a group of middle-aged men, returning by habit to stare across the table at increasingly unfriendly faces.
Karlo, for his part, had now become increasingly supportive of the nationalist movement in Croatia, and drew inspiration from the Austrian-born political agitator Hitler. Jelena died heartbroken. Klemens, now working in a low-level government position, pondered his next move as the specter of total war engulfed the globe again.
It was at this time that the man who identified himself only as Johannes appeared. He approached Klemens and Karlo following one of the final, desultory meetings of the veterans’ club. Johannes claimed to have seen the future and what he foretold for the Balkans unsettled both brothers: years of unrelenting world war giving way to Communist rule, threat of nuclear annihilation, chaos, upheaval, and ethnic cleansing. Johannes’ offer was quite simple: he would take both brothers away to an idyllic country, untroubled by modern warfare. They would be placed in positions of authority, as befitting former officers of a great Empire. After ten years of service, they would be returned to any nation of their choosing, rich men for their troubles. In the new land, Klemens dove into his new role with the mechanical efficiency he had adopted to survive his tenure at the Italian front. But as the years passed, Klemens became convinced that there would never be a return trip for him.
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The Foster Children of Time
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