Against the Day (100 page)

   
“What
happened? We went to sleep in Lübeck and woke up here.”

“I’m
headed for Göttingen,” Kit said, “if there’s any message I can take for you,
I’d be happy to.”

“How
good can your chances be of getting there if you’re hiding down here like us?”

   
“Temporary
setback,” Kit mumbled.

Towndwellers
, Susi tradesfolk, Berbers from up
the valley, merchants in with caravans from the mountains and the desert beyond
left off the minu

tiae of day’s business to stand along the beach and gaze,
uncertain of their peril. Few here had ever seen a vessel bigger than a fishing
boat, except for passing shapes farther out to sea, unreadable as to size.
Treeclimbing goats up in the branches of argan trees paused in their browsing
after the olivelike fruit to regard the metal visitation. Gnaoua musicians
invoked the
mlouk gnaoui,
calling upon the doorkeeper of the Seigneurs
Noirs to open the door of good and evil. Everyone agreed that the ship must
have come from someplace very far away—to suppose it had originated with
one of “The Great Powers” did little to clarify the question, as the phrase,
here on this isolated coast, must embrace possibilities beyond secular
geography.

The brilliant white walls of the town
presented themselves to the tall predator drifting arrogant and unadorned in
out of the daily uneventfulness, casting sharpedged shadows through a haze of
combustion from both its own stacks and fires set hastily ashore, whether in
friendliness or fear was uncertain
. . . .

And as if reincarnated from some
intermediate or Bardo state, one night of no moon the civilian passengers,
including Kit, slipped one by one from an opening in the side of the
Emperor
Maximilian
originally intended for the launching of midget submarines and
were rowed secretly ashore, after which the dreadnought put to sea again. Kit,
not convinced he had a future in the Habsburg navy, had decided to debark here,
and quickly found a room between the port and the Mogador road and begun
hanging around a waterfront bar, the Tawil Balak.

“In town here we’re pretty
cosmopolitan,” said Rahman the barkeep, “but you don’t want to be going too far
up the valley.” One night some fisherman showed up off a steam trawler
operating independently out of Ostend, the
Fomalhaut
,
which a couple of crew members had
jumped in Tangier. “We’re shorthanded,” the skipper told Kit. “You’re hired.”

The rest of the evening passed in a
fog. Kit remembered getting into a discussion of the
Two
Stupendica
problem with Moïses, a resident Jewish
mystic. “Not unusual for these parts, actually. Jonah is the classic case.
Recall that he was traveling to Tarshish, whose port, five hundred miles north
of here, we call Cádiz today, one of whose alternate names is Agadir. But
tradition in
this
Agadir is that Jonah came ashore just to the south of
here, at Massa. There is a mosque commemorating the event.”

“Two Agadirs,” said Kit, puzzled. “He
went out into the Atlantic? He landed both places at once, five hundred miles
apart?”

“As if the Straits of Gibraltar acted
as some metaphysical junction point between the worlds. In those days to pass
through that narrow aperture into the vast, uncertain field of Ocean was to
leave behind the known world, and

perhaps its conventions about being
in only one place at a time
. . . .
Once

passed through, did the ship take two tacks at once? Did the
wind blow two

ways? Or was it the giant fish that possessed the power of
bilocation? Two fishes, two Jonahs, two Agadirs?”

“This smoke in here I’ve been
breathing,” said Kit, “this wouldn’t be
. .
.
um, hasheesh?”

   
“Never
heard of the substance,” the holy person seeming offended.

It was dark in the establishment. As
if there were less need for ordinary sources of light, a single lamp was
burning evilsmelling sheep fat. Up in the Kashbah, people were singing
themselves into trances. Somewhere out in the street, the Gnaoua musicians were
playing lutes and keeping time with metal hand percussion, and they were
invisible to all but those for whom they played.

They had left
the Bay of Agadir, rounding Ighir
Ufrani as the sunlight was just touching the tops of the mountains, and set a
course northeastward toward the English Channel, steaming just out of sight of
the coast. Except for some local Moroccan fish, Mogador herring and
alimzah
and
tasargelt,
the catches as they moved north became bad to indifferent,
which the rest of the crew blamed on Kit’s presence, until suddenly one morning
out in the Bay of Biscay the
Fomalhaut
blundered somehow into a giant
school of fish of several kinds, so immoderately abundant as to put serious
stress on the warps and winches. “It had to happen someday,” the skipper
supposed. “Bloody Jonah in reverse, is what it is. Look at this.” Indeed
several sorts of fish seemed to be present in the dynamic silver glittering
that spilled into the pounds and prodigally across the deck and over the side
again each time the codends of the nets were untied. Kit was put to work
sorting the catch, trusted at first only to tell edible fish from scruff, but
soon developing a sense of nuance among turbot and brill, cod and hake, sole,
plaice, and bream.

As soon as the starboard trawl was empty,
they shot the port one again. There seemed no end to this continentsize school
they had steamed into. Kit now found himself getting looks even stranger than
before.

It went on for a day and a night
until there was no more room on board, not even for a single sardine, and they
came wallowing in to Ostend, into the Staketsel and down the channel, gunwales
all but awash. There were fish in the lazarettes and rope lockers, fish spilled
out the portholes and came flopping out of charts as they were unrolled on the
chart table, hours later, crewmen were finding fish in their pockets, not to
mention—“Ah,
pardon, mon chou
,
that’s not what you think it is—”

·
    
·
    
·

Meanwhile
, leaving its military double to
wander the mists, the
Stupendica
continued its civilian journey.

Bria tried to cheer Dally up. “Hey,
you know what they say about shipboard romances.”

   
“Is
that what it was?”

   
“You’d
know better’n me, you’re the adventuress.”

   
“How
about his friend?”

“Οl’ RootyToot? I asked already,
he said they got separated down in the engine room and nobody’s seen Kit
since.”

How crazy did she have to get about
this? Dally went searching all through the
Stupendica,
from moon deck to
lower orlop, asking passengers, stewards, stokers, deck hands, officers if
they’d seen Kit. No luck. At dinner she confronted the Captain.

“He may have debarked at Agadir, but
I’ll send a wireless message,” the Captain promised.

Sure. All she hoped at this point was
that the damn fickle Yalie hadn’t gone over the side. She sought out the least
populated spaces on the ship and lay in a deck chair glaring off at the waves,
which helpfully turned dark, deliberate, steepsided, whitecapped, while the sky
clouded over and presently a storm swept upon them from off the starboard bow.

At Gibraltar the ship seemed to
pause, as if waiting for clearance. She dreamed that passengers had been
allowed to go ashore for a little while, and that she watched from some night
eyrie, up in the stormy heights, directly above the merciless black “Atlantic.”
Where had that confounded Kit disappeared to? Briefly she had a clear image of
him somewhere far below, at the base of the steep rock face, seeming to push a
small, imperfect boat out into the gray magnitudes, about to embark on some
impossible journey
. . . .

The
Stupendica
moved along,
keeping close to the Mediterranean coastline, passing port after port, houses
and foliage spilling down pale cliffs, inhabitants busy with their lives in the
steeplypitched streets of each town, little lateenriggers venturing out to
circle like moths.

Erlys kept a considerate distance,
not about to start in hammering on this romantic setback of Dally’s, especially
since neither seemed to have a very clear idea of how important it might be.
Dally had expected Bria would be the first one to put her through this, except
that somehow, quietly and with no effort her mother could see, Bria had gone
cakewalking quite beyond any sound advice she might once have offered, playing
not only Root Tubsmith but a good part of the fourthclass passenger list like
fish in an ornamental pond.

As
if she had exited her life briefly and been given the ability to travel on a
parallel course, “close” enough to watch herself doing it, Dally discovered an
alternate way to travel by land, port to port, faster than the ship was moving
. . . .
She sped, it seemed slightly above
ground level, through the fragrant latesummer twilight, parallel to the course
of the ship
. . .
perhaps, now and
then, over a break in the dunes and scrub and low concrete walls, catching a
glimpse of the
Stupendica,
under way, passing along the eternal coast,
dogged and slow, all details, folds, and projections muted gray as a fly’s body
seen through its wings. . . as night came falling and the ship, outraced, crept
on behind
. . . .
She would return to
her deck chair out of breath, sweating, ~exhilirated for no reason, as if she
had just escaped some organized threat to her safety.

They paused at Venice in the fog in
the middle of the night to allow for some brief ghostly transaction. Dally
woke, peered out the porthole and saw a flotilla of black gondolas, each with a
single lantern, each bearing a single cloaked passenger, who all stood solidly
gazing ahead into something only they seemed to understand. This is Venice? she
remembered thinking, then went back to sleep. In the morning they put in at
last to the
Stupendica
’s
home
port, Trieste. Crowds had turned out in the Piazza Grande to welcome her in.
Ladies in enormous hats, on the arms of AustroHungarian army officers in blue,
scarlet, and gold, promenaded along the Riva with all the certitude of dream. A
military band played medleys of Verdi, Denza, and local favorite Antonio
Smareglia.

Dally allowed herself to be swept
gently ashore in the bustle of debarkation. It felt like she was standing
still. She had never even heard of this place. Never mind Kit for the
moment—where was she?

ollowed by equivocal stares from the crew of the
Fomalhaut,
Kit col

lected his pay at Ostend and stepped wobbling onto the
Fishermen’s

Quai, boarded the electric tram, and rode as far as the
Continental, where for some reason he assumed there’d be a room reserved and
waiting. But they had never heard of him. Almost taking it personally, he was
about to invoke the Vibe name when he caught a glimpse of himself in one of the
goldframed lobby mirrors, and sanity intervened. Judas priest. He looked like
debris washed up on the beach. Smelled that way too, come to think of it.
Outside again, he caught another tram, which took him into town along the
Boulevard van Iseghem before making a couple of left turns and heading back
toward the Basins again. The crowds he saw were all far more streetplausible
than he was. At the Quai de l’Empereur, almost where he started from, Kit got
off with no better sense of what to do with himself, went in a little
estaminet, and sat over in a corner with a twelvecentime glass of beer,
reviewing the situation. He had enough money to put up someplace overnight at
least, before figuring out how to get to Göttingen.