Against the Day (129 page)

Kit
had one of those moments of extralogical grasp more appropriate to mathematical
work. “Then leaving Göttingen . . .”

“Leaving
Göttingen. No. It was never my choice,” as if trying to explain it to Riemann,
to the fraction of him that had lingered here forty years as if waiting for the
one graveside confession he must not miss, “not for any trivial reason. Not
when it means exile into . . .” she did not quite include Kit in her
gesture—“this. Whatever hopes I may have had for the ζfunction, for
the new geometry, for transcendence by way of any of that, must be left behind,
souvenirs of a girl’s credulity, a girl I scarcely know anymore. At Göttingen I
had no visitation, no prophecy, no plan, I was only safe
. . .
safe in my studies, comfortably in and out the doorways of
the daily farces and flirtations, the quiet Sunday walks up on the wall around
the old town. Now I am expelled from the garden. Now in a smooth enough
WorldLine comes this terrible discontinuity. And on the far side of it, I find
that now I am also
strannik.
”
Her extraordinary eyes remained directed at the grave. “There are
teachers. Teachers who have us for a while, allow us to see particular things,
and then send us on, without regard to how we may have come to feel about them.
We depart, wondering if now, perhaps, we will not be in a state of departure

forever. We go off to dwell night by
night beneath the floors of Europe, on another sort of journey into another
sort of soul, in which we must discard

everything, not only the objects we possess but everything we
have taken to be ‘real,’ all we have learned, all the work we have put in, the
theorems, the proofs, the questioning, the breathtaken trembling before the
beauty of an intractable problem, all of which was perhaps illusion.”

It
did seem to him she might be putting it a little dramatically. “Letting all of
that go.” He wanted to light up a cigarette but held himself there, tense. “Big
step, Yashmeen.”

She
gazed for a while through the wind back at Monte Rosso, and the lighted Swiss
peaks beyond. “It was so easy to forget this other world out here, with its
enemies and intrigues and pestilent secrets
.
. . .
I knew it must claim me again, I had no choice, but, Kit, you
. . .
perhaps no one after all has the
right to ask
. . . .
”

“Just
an innocent American cowpoke don’t know what he stumbled into. Why do you say
‘no choice’? You want to tell me what’s going on?”

   
“No.
Not really.”

Yashmeen had
arranged
to reconnect
with elements of the T.W.I.T. at the fabled Sanatorium BöpfliSpazzoletta, on
the Swiss side of Lago Maggiore. Kit, not sure if he’d be welcome, tagged along
anyway. The place was gigantic, offering enough of a range in levels of taste
to please everyone, from the most godawful kitsch to austere anterooms of death
befitting the consumptive chic then so enchanting Europe. They had to wander around
for twenty minutes before they could even figure out how to ask directions.
From somewhere came sounds of a dance orchestra, though it was still pretty
early in the day.

   
“Act
normal, Kit. And don’t say my name.”

It
would’ve taken Kit a minute anyway to recognize Reef—who this had to
be—seeing that his brother had undergone some redesign, the hat being a
highcrowned black Borsalino whose brim was Reefmodified to keep the rain off at
least, the suit definitely not of American cut, his hair longer and strangely
greased, his mustache gone. Kit would have taken him for a tourist from
someplace out in Deep Europe, except for the voice, and the old amiable
lopsidedness to his face so long beaten at by realities difficult to mistake
for other than American—personable as it needed to be, but only when it
needed to be, the rest of the time wary and remote.

   
“Long
way from ’em San Juans,” Kit mumbled. “Just where’n the hell did

you blow in from?” feeling this stealthy onset of emotion.
But Reef was being cautious.

“Tunnelin for the railroads,”
gesturing outside with his head, “Alps and so forth.” They sat there nodding
and beaming a while. “Little cardplay in the hydropathics maybe. How come
you’re not back in the U.S., hobnobbin with that summer set at Newport, Rhode
Island, playin polo, whatever.”

“Guess you’d say I’m on the run.”
While Reef slowly shook his head and pretended to snicker, Kit gave him the
abridged version, up to spotting Foley in Göttingen. “Really all went sour the
minute it started, I should’ve got off before Glenwood Springs, turned around,
come back, but. . .” But couldn’t figure how to say more. Somewhere not far
below these social niceties was a moment that waited, something to do with
their father and some terrible calculating, with brothers seeing each other
again, with reconnection of paths and promises and so forth, and Kit would just
as soon it all took its time arriving.

Reef watched him fret for a while.
“Some night we’ll stay up all night and swap shouldofs, meantime be content
that you held on longer’n me at least.”

“Just stupid. Just slow. Can’t
believe how long it took me to see.” Kit sat there watching the floor as if it
might drop away, nodding as if listening to himself. A waiter came by and Reef
asked him something in some dialect that got him a quizzical overtheshoulder
second look.

   
“Like
the man never heard tunnel Italian before.”

Ruperta ChirpingdonGroin and her
party had descended by way of the St.Gotthard Tunnel from league after league
of peaks like ocean waves frozen in place, fading into merciless light, tending
to eternity—a circuit of Alpine hotels and hydropathics so remote the
hotels had to print up their own postal stamps just to get mail as far as a
regular Swiss post office, full of giggling nitwits, quite a number of them
British actually, running about the corridors, jumping off balconies into the
snowdrifts, hiding in servingpantries and falling down dumbwaiter shafts. They
had detrained at Bellinzona, where the motordiligence from the Sanatorium was
waiting for them, and so up to the famed institution overlooking the Swiss
shores of Lago Maggiore. Goats grazing by the roadside turned their heads to
watch them pass, as if long familiar with BöpfliSpazzoletta clientele. From
somewhere came a repeated figure being played on an alpenhorn.

Though he was not ready to share it
with his brother, not even Reef had been exempt from the folly up there. “What
kind of a dog’s that?” he asked Ruperta at one point.

   
“Mouffette?
She’s a papillon
. . .
a sort of
French ladies’ lapdog.”

   
“A—You
say,” gears in his mind beginning to crank,
“
‘
lap’—
French
. . .
lap
dog?”
Somehow gathering that
Ruperta had trained her toy spaniel to provide intimate “French” caresses of
the tongue for the pleasure of its mistress. “Well! you two are
. . .
pretty close then, I guess?”

“I
wuv
my ickle woofwoof, ess
I doo!” Squeezing the animal tightly, one would think painfully, except for the
apparent enjoyment with which Mouffette was fluttering her eyelids.

   
“Hmm,”
said Reef.

“And
today I must go across the lake, and the mean old people there won’t allow my
ickle pwecious to come with Mummy, and we were both wondering if her good Uncle
Reef would look after her for the day, see that she gets her chopped filet and
her boiled pheasant, as she’s
so
particular.”

“Sure,
you bet!” His thoughts taking wing. The day alone with a French “lap” dog! who
might be more than happy to do for Reef what she was obviously already doing
for old ’Pert here! who in fact, mmaybe all this time’s been just droolin’ for
onethem penises for a change, and will turn out to know
plenty of tricks!
Aand—

It
took a while for Ruperta to get her toilette perfect and her bustle out the
door. Reef found himself pacing and smoking, and whenever he took a look over
at Mouffette could’ve sworn she was fidgeting too. The dog, it seemed to Reef,
was giving him sidewise looks which if they’d come from a woman you would have
had to call flirtatious. Finally after an extended farewell notable for its
amount of saliva exchange, Mouffette slowly padded over to the divan where Reef
was sitting and jumped up to sit next to him. Jumping on the furniture was
something Ruperta seldom allowed her to do, and her gaze at Reef clearly
assumed that he would not get upset. Far from it, what he actually got was an
erection. Mouffette looked it over, looked away, looked back, and suddenly
jumped up on his lap.

“Oboy, oboy.” He stroked the
diminutive spaniel for a while until, with no warning, she jumped off the couch
and slowly went into the bedroom, looking back now and then over her shoulder.
Reef followed, taking out his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth.
“Here, Mouffie, nice
big dog bone
for you right here, lookit this, yeah,
seen many of these lately?
come
on, smells good don’t it, mmm, yum!” and
so forth, Mouffette meantime angling her head, edging closer, sniffing with
curiosity. “That’s right, now, ooopen up
. .
.
good
girl, good Mouffette now let’s just put this—
yaahhgghh!
”

Reader,
she bit him. After which, as if surprised at the vehemence of his reaction,
Mouffette jumped off the bed and while Reef went looking for an ice bucket, ran
off somehow into the vast hotel. Reef chased her for a while but found it was
getting him funny looks from the staff.

In the days that followed, Mouffette
took every occasion to jump up in Reef’s lap and gaze into his
eyes—sarcastically, it seemed to Reef—opening her mouth
suggestively, sometimes even drooling. Each time Reef tried not to flinch. Each
time Ruperta, exasperated, would cry, “Honestly, it isn’t as if she means to
bite
you.”

“
Reef
,
allow me to present Miss Yashmeen
Halfcourt. Yash, this strangelookin old skeezicks is my brother Reef.”

   
“A
pleasure, Miss Halfcourt.”

“Mr. Traverse.” For a minute she had
thought she was seeing Kit and his own somehow aged or gravely assaulted
double. “I see you move in smart society,” shifting her eyes to the
ChirpingdonGroin party.

“Luck of the rails, miss,” a roguish
readjustment Kit had seen too often beginning to creep among his brother’s
features. “It seems one day they needed a fourth player for this game they call
‘auction’ bridge, all the go now in the London clubs, I’m told, scores much
higher than the regular bridge game, you see, so if one is playing for so much
a point, why . . .” The old wistful shrug, as if to say,
Easy me, what can I
do? It’s my curse, just a mark who can’t resist a big payoff.
Kit with an
effort refrained from gazing heavenward.

   
“Yes.
It’s very like a Russian game we call
vint.
”

“Heard of that one. Never could catch
on to the scoring, though. Maybe you’ll teach it to me sometime.”

Across the vast reception hall,
Ruperta’s ears, emerging from her coiffure, were observed to grow rapidly
incandescent.

“Well,” as she put it later, “your
brother’s little wog seems to’ve taken quite a fancy to
you
. He’s rather a fresh face himself, perhaps we might arrange a
swap, what do you think?”

   
“Strictly
business, ’Pert.”

“Obviously. You couldn’t call her
nobility—the shallowest sort of
avantyuristka,
I can’t believe
they even let persons like that in the door here, I believe I shall have a word
in fact with Marcello.”

“Now, ’Pert, try to think back, it
wa’n’t ’at long ago you were playin pretty much the same hand.”

   
“You
hateful beast.”

Meantime,
Kit and Yashmeen sat eating dinner at a table with a view of the darkening lake
and an evening storm sweeping up from the south.

“Reef
was always the reckless one,” he recalled, “what folks call ‘wild,’ and Frank
was the reasonable one, may’ve gone crazy now and then for a minute and a half,
but I was never around to see it.”

   
“And
what about you, Kit?”

   
“Oh,
I was just the baby.”

“I think you were the religious one.”
Hard to tell just then if she was teasing. “Look at what you got into.
Sectarian vector wars, trafficking with the unseen, priesthoods and heresies .
. .”

“Guess it was always pretty practical
for me.” It wasn’t, but he’d have to wait for some three o’clock
mathematician’s insomnia to work any of that through.

She was looking at him meanwhile in a
way he knew he should be smart enough to decipher. “In the world. Of the world.
No,” shaking her head, “vows of abstinence, or . . .”

It
did not help his abrupt discombobulancy that Yashmeen had showed up looking
exceptionally radiant, her black hair pouring all the way down to her waist,
where it whispered against the bow at the back of a frock that seemed made only
to flirt in, her mouth carefully rouged in a shadowy cerise into the first
derivative of a kiss of unknown duration
. .
. .
Just damned impossibly nifty, is what he supposed he meant.