Against the Day (159 page)

It wasn’t exactly
the Hôtel de Ville, nor was she
sleeping too frightfully well. The place seemed surrounded with tram lines, and
the noise was, well, not really unremitting, there were quiet spaces between
trams, unpredictable, even, she imagined, mathematically so. But it was the
coffee metropolis of the Austrian Empire here, if not of the world, and she was
never farther than half a block from the countersoporific fluid, so she was
able to get through most days without falling into slumber inconveniently, say
in the middle of an attempt to avoid what she imagined, in her sleepless and
paranoiac state, to be pursuit.

Vlado,
who was unpredictably in and out of town, showed up at the door it seemed only
when he desired her, which turned out to be often. How could a girl not be
flattered? Obviously it could not be, could it, as simple as desire, but it was
not the careful protocol of courting that required appointments in advance
either. She had learned to recognize his step on the carpetless
stairway—among the bullelephant thundering of sailors, the imperious
creep of philandering merchants, the marchtempo of Austrian military, each
insisting on his primacy, there was no mistaking Vlado, the sensitive crescendo
of his no less fervid approach.

By
now she had heard enough through the walls to know that when one is having an
orgasm in Croatian, the thing to scream is
“
Svr šavam!
”
though she didn’t always
remember to, memory having been, in the event, often disengaged.

Vlado
kept an address in Venice, a couple of rooms in Cannareggio, in the old ghetto,
multiplynested among Jews pushed heavenward floor above floor
. . .
and nearly impossible to locate. And
somehow that’s where she found herself more and more. I’m turning Jewish, she
thought, all that Viennese antiSemitism is conjuring up what it most hates, how
odd
. . . .
”I don’t know. I was
expecting horses, abduction up into the Velebit, wolves at night.”

He
pretended to think about this. “You wouldn’t mind if I did a little business
while we’re down here. And take in the city sights of Venice of course, a
gondola ride, Florian’s, that sort of thing. Wolves, we can arrange wolves

I’m sure.”

·
    
·
    
·

One day they
took the train to Fiume and boarded
the mail steamer for Zengg, with a dozen German tourists and a small herd of
goats. “I have to show you this,” he said. He meant, “This is who I am,” but
she didn’t understand until it was too late to matter. Eventually the narrow
passage between the island of Veglia and the mainland opened out into the
Morlacca Canal, and within two hours they stood off Zengg, facing a fierce bora
which came barreling down through a gap in the Velebit. It was as if the sea
would not allow them to enter. The sea here, Vlado said, the currents and wind,
were a composite being with intentions of its own. It had a name which was
never spoken. Coastal sailors here told of individual waves with faces, and
voices, which persisted from day to day, instead of blending back into the
general swell.

   
“Stationary
waves,” she speculated.

   
“Sentries,”
replied Vlado.

   
“How
are we going to get into port then?”

“The
captain is one of the Novlians, an old Uskok family. It is in his blood. He
knows how to do business with them.”

She
watched the hillside town, pastel houses, belltowers, a ruined castle at the
top. The bells now all began to ring at once. The bora carried the sound out to
the steamer. “Each campanile in Zengg is tuned to a different ecclesiastical
mode,” said Vlado. “Listen to the dissonances.” Yashmeen heard them move
through the field of metal tones like slow wingbeats
. . .
and at the base of it the sea’s outlaw pulse.

Ashore
it seemed that all the Uskok hinterland, not only in geographical space but
also a backcountry of time, had come piling into town as if for a fair or
market. The old rivalries between Turkey and Austria, even Venice enigmatically
hovering as always, were still alive, because the Peninsula was still the
mixture of faiths and languages it had always been, the Adriatic was still the
fertile field wherein merchant shipping must be prey to the wolves of piracy
who lurked among the maze of islands that so confounded the Argonauts even
before history began.

“Until
the early sixteenth century, we lived on the other side of the mountains. Then
the Turks invaded, and forced us off our land. We came over the Velebit range
and down to the sea, and kept fighting them all the way. We were guerrillas.
The Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I gave us an annual subsidy. Our great fortress
was just inland from Split, at Clissa, which is where my name comes from. We
fought the Turks on land and kept them on the other side of the Velebit, but we
also learned to fight them at sea. Our boats were

better, more nimble, they could go
where vessels of deeper draft could not, and if we had to land, we could beach
and hide them by sinking them, do our business, come back, raise them again and
sail away. For generations we defended Christendom even when Venice could not.
And it was Venice who sold us out. They made a deal with the Turks,
guaranteeing their safety in the Adriatic. So we did what anybody would have
done. We kept attacking ships, only now Venetian ships as well as Turkish. Many
of these carried unexpectedly rich cargoes.”

   
“You
were pirates,” she said.

Vlado
made a face. “We try to avoid that word. You know the play by Shakespeare,
The
Merchant of Venice
?
Very
popular with us, of course from the Uskok point of view, we keep hoping till
the end for Antonio to come to grief.”

   
“You
ate people’s hearts,” she said, “so the stories go.”

“Myself,
personally? no. Raw heart is an acquired taste, and by that time, ‘Uskok’ had
come to embrace the
mala vita
of all Europe, including a number of quite
notorious British Uskoks, several of whom were hanged in Venice in 1618, some
of them nobility.”

“There
are English people who’d be impressed by that,” Yash supposed, “while others
might attribute it to hereditary idiocy.”

They
had climbed to the ruin of the ancient fortress. “The Venetians did this. They
hanged Uskoks, sank our ships, destroyed our fortresses. Dispersed the rest of
us, completing what the Turks had begun. Since then, four hundred years, we
have been exiles in our own land. No reason to love Venice, and yet we continue
to dream of her, as Germans are said to dream of Paris. Venice is the bride of
the sea, whom we wish to abduct, to worship, to hope in vain someday to be
loved by. But of course she will never love us. We are pirates, aren’t we,
brutal and simple, too attached to the outsides of things, always amazed when
blood flows from the wound of our enemy. We cannot conceive of any interior
that might be its source, yet we obey its demands, arriving by surprise from
some Beyond we cannot imagine, as if from one of the underground rivers of the
Velebit, down in that labyrinth of streams, lakes, coves, and cataracts, each
with its narrative, sometimes even older than the Argonauts’
expedition—before history, or even the possibility of connected chronology—before
maps, for what is a map in that lightless underworld, what pilgrimage can it
mark out the stations of?”

“A
list of obstacles to be braved,” she said. “What other sort of journey is
there?”

They
stayed overnight at the Zagreb Hotel. Shortly after sunrise Vlado disappeared
upcountry on one of his political errands. She had coffee and a palaćinka
and drifted through the narrow streets of the town, at midday, on

an impulse too hidden from her to account for, entering a
little church, kneeling and praying for his safety.

At
dusk she was at a table outside a café, and knew from the way he came strolling
through the little piazza that there had been a recreational element in his day
he would not tell her about. The moment they were in the room, he had seized
her, turned her around, forced her onto her face and knees, lifted her dress,
and entered her savagely from behind. Her eyes filled with tears, and a great
erotic despair filled her like an unending breath. She came with the intensity
she had grown to expect with Vlado, trying this time to do so in silence, to
keep at least this for herself, but with no success.

   
“You
have eaten my heart,” she cried.

yprian, embarking from the Molo San Carlo on the Austrian
Lloyd express steamer
John of Asia,
found the decks aswarm with
butterflyhunters, birdwatchers, widows and divorcées, photographers,
schoolgirls and their guardians, all of whom, without undue exercise of the
organs of fantasy, might be supposed foreign spies, it being clearly in the
interests of Italy, Serbia, Turkey, Russia, and Great Britain to know what was
afoot at the Austrian installations at Pola and the Bocche di Cattaro and the
coastline approaching infinite length which lay in between.

Yashmeen’s
white tall figure, parasol over her shoulder, already a ghost in full sunlight,
went fading into the crowds flowing in and out through the trees between the
quay and the Piazza Grande. A young birch in a sombre forest. But he still
could see her pale phantom long after it ought to have vanished behind the
lighthouse and the breakwaters.

If
there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected, as we watch the
possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined
quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirrorsymmetry about departure, a
denial
of
inevitability, an opening out from
the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an
unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its
appearance ahead and astern, port and starboard, everywhere an expanding of
possibility, even for ship’s company who may’ve made this run hundreds of times
. . . .

The
plan was to pick up Bevis Moistleigh at Pola, the Austrian naval base five
hours down the coast at the tip of the Istrian Peninsula. Bevis had been down
there pretending to be a neuræsthenic on a budget, staying at a mod

est hotel off the Via Arsenale.

They passed smoothly along the
redandgreen Istrian coast, and as they neared Pola, a ship’s officer went up
and down the weather decks advising tourists with cameras that for military
reasons photographs were now prohibited. Cyprian noticed a sprightly young
creature scampering all round the ship in a translucent sailorgirl’s outfit of
white lawn and lace, hatless, charming everybody in her path, including
Cyprian, he supposed. He learned with little effort that her name was Jacintha
Drulov, that her mother was English and her father Croatian, both aristocrats,
who had both unfortunately passed away in her infancy in the course of separate
golfing accidents, and that she was now under the protection of her mother’s
cousin Lady Quethlock, with whom she had recently spent a brief holiday in
Venice before returning to school at the Zhenski Tzrnogorski Institut in
Cetinje. As soon as Cyprian observed guardian and ward together, certain
nuances of touching, intentions to touch, withholdings of touch, as well as
publicly inflicted torments of a refinement he recognized, suggested strongly
that he was in the presence of a Lady Spy and her apprentice. This was
confirmed by the mutterings of a pair Cyprian had already spotted as senior
desk agents, of the sort who consider the employment of nubile children as
field “ops” quite inexcusable.

   
“What
can the damned fool woman have in mind?”