Against the Day (162 page)

   
“Makes
no sense,” Bevis muttered.

“It
happens sometimes,” Danilo darkly, “but more in the old tales than in our
present day. The head of an infidel betrays him by
rejecting the fez.
Perhaps
you are both quite devout Christians?”

   
“Not
especially,” Cyprian and Bevis protested at the same time.

   
“The
fez knows,” said Danilo. “You cannot fool the fez.”

·
    
·
    
·

Two weeks later
things had desperately deteriorated.
Cyprian and Danilo were adrift and mapless in a region of mountains and forest
and unexpected deep wooded ravines, into some of which, actually, they had just
missed falling. Equally distressing, they had lost Bevis. On the way up to
BosnaBrod, he had simply and unaccountably vanished from the train.

They searched through carriages full
of Jewish families traveling to the mineral springs at Kiseljak, engineers from
the manganese mine at Cevljanovic, coal and iron miners, wives and children and
faithful sweethearts (a category which caused Cyprian vague discomfort), on the
way to visit inmates at the prison in Zenica, all with no success. Fearing
mischief, Cyprian, wanting only to go on, had felt obliged to get off and look
for Bevis.

   
Danilo
seemed afraid now for his life. “Forget about him.”

   
“We’re
both supposed to bring you out.”

   
“He
can take care of himself, he is no longer your concern.”

“Oh? Did Theign shop him, too?”
Cyprian sensed a familiar melancholy oozing ever closer.

   
“English.
You are fools.”

“Nevertheless—”
Cyprian reached for the emergency cord, and in the heated discussion with
guards and conductors that followed, Cyprian pretended to fall into a sort of
hysteria he had often found useful, Danilo looking on as if it were a
performance in a park, as remote from his day as puppets hitting one another
with clubs.

The
last time either of them remembered seeing Bevis aboard was a little before
Laiva, the junction for Travnik and Jajce. “There was a connection waiting,”
the conductor shrugged. “Your friend might have changed trains and gone up to
Jajce.” He agreed to wire the Bosna Line office back in Sarajevo, Cyprian and
Danilo got off, and the train went on. They backtracked, searching defiles and
streamsides till they lost the daylight, asking fishermen, crossingguards,
peasantry, wanderers, but none had seen a young Englishman in a seaweedgreen
suit. Not until well after dark did they get to Lasva, where they found an inn
and tried to sleep till first light, before catching the morning train up to
Jajce. Cyprian gazed out the windows, first one side, then the other. Danilo
just as resolutely did not.

   
“It
might even have been his own idea,” he said after a while.

   
“You’ll
be next, I imagine,” Cyprian was afraid he rather snapped back.

“Some choice—the fucking
Austrians out there or your dubious protection. Either way, I’m dead.” In Jajce
there was a hundredfoot waterfall, with most of the town up on an eggshaped
hill, and an ancient fortress. They

decided to walk from the station out,
to the GrandHôtel, on the theory that if Bevis were in the neighborhood, he’d
likely be there. The place looked like it had been transported in, by some dark
art, direct from the Austrian Alps. Cyprian cupped an ear. “Is that yodeling I
hear? Will the staff be wearing those, those
hats
?
lederhosen? Actually, lederhosen in the present circs .
. .” he lapsed into a moment’s heated reverie.

Nobody
at the reception desk had seen Bevis. “But those gentlemen over there have been
waiting for you, I believe.”

Cyprian
was down into a spinning crouch and trying to remember where he’d put his
pistol. Danilo waited with a caustic smile, shaking his head slowly side to
side as the two visitors, creating around themselves a zone of avoidance,
approached.

Black
Hand, Danilo was sure. “As long as they think we are Serbian agents, they will
be sympathetic—
Zdravo, gospodini.
”

Wasting no time on pleasantries,
Batko, the larger of the two, nodded them toward the restaurant bar. Cyprian
had an impression of dark wood and antlered heads. Batko ordered sljivovica all
round. His companion, Senta, took out a pocket notebook, studied it briefly,
and said, “Here it is, then—you must keep clear of all trains.”

   
“
Ne
razumen,
”
puzzled
Danilo.

“Austrians
are trying to make sure you two never get to the Croatian border. They have
sent in motor vehicles, and at least a dozen wellarmed men.”

   
“For
little us?” said Cyprian.

“We
of the—” Batko, pretending to pout, left a pulse of silence where it was
advisable not to insert “Black Hand”—“will always protect our own. But
you are guests in Bosnia, and tradition says that guests are last to die. And
considering who it is that wants to kill you . . .” He shrugged.

“Your choices from here on are few.”
Senta produced a small, damaged map, apparently removed from a guidebook. “You
can go on foot, up the river, here, two days, to Banjaluka, and if you feel by
then that you must risk the train again, try for Zagreb. Or you can go back the
way you came, back through Vakuf, to Bugojno, where you can pick up the
diligence route, through the mountains, down to the coast, and find a boat out
of Split. There are of course a thousand footpaths, and it’s easy to get lost,
it is nearly winter, there are wolves, so the carriage road might be best for
you, as long as you stay alert.”

“Once
we got over the crestline,” Cyprian said, “I’d feel comfortable enough in the
Velebit, and I know people there. But I don’t suppose we could hire a guide for
this side,” which provoked some merriment.

   
“These
are busy times for everyone,” explained Batko.
 
“If you really

needed help, you could try shouting ‘Union or Death,’ but
there’d be no guarantee
. . . .
”

   
The
discussion proved academic, soon enough.

Cyprian and
Danilo
made their way
along a valley, leaves on the steep hillsides changing color, willows down by
the water gone leafless and broodful, small waterfalls loud in the autumnal
withdrawal of humans and livestock, the air cool and still, and no sign of unwelcome
attention since they had left Batko and Senta, faces furrowed in sad farewell,
by the chlorine works outside of town.

That evening they bought a trout and
some cooked crayfish in a bag and had just entered an olive grove where they
were thinking of settling for the night, when with no warning the air was
filled with the highspeed purring of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition striking, for
the moment, surfaces other than human and bouncing mercifully elsewhere, though
it was now of the essence to find one’s way inside the moment, with death
invisible and everywhere, “like God,” it occurred to Danilo afterward. Plaster
was spalled off the stone walls by the road. Patches of white dust were kicked
up into the air. They went running through the olive grove, leaves of the trees
twitching in the invisible storm, nearly ripened fruit falling. Geese somewhere
woke up and began to clamor, as if this sort of thing was supposed to go on
only in the daytime.

   
“Do
you have your pistol?”

Danilo
waved a little Portuguese army .32 Savage. “It doesn’t matter, I’ve only two
clips for it.”

They
ran half blind for higher ground. The dark saved them. So they were chased off,
uphill, among rock pinnacles, into the forest and the mountains and
progressively wilder terrain, and all question of alloyed steel, geometric
purity of gauge, railways and timetables and the greater network, not to
mention European time as it usually passed, ceased to be any part of their day,
and they were swept back into the previous century. Autumn kept rolling in, the
colors darkening, the black that rests at the heart of all color reasserting
itself. The mountains were draped in banners of cloud torn as if from distant
battles already begun, projections of the Crisis
. . . .
Sheep that had mingled with the shadows of clouds across
the valley floors were presently gone to shelter against the winter nearly upon
this country, the limestone mountains seemed to climb the sky, to grow more
proud, as temperatures fell, and the first snow appeared on the heights. Chimney
smoke from lignite fires collected in the valleys. The light in these mountains
toward dusk grew solemn and awful. The fugitives longed to be in out of it, and
yet knew their only

chances for deliverance here lay
outdoors, away from refugehuts, hunting lodges and hydropathics. They must be
where the stone martens glided like ghosts from shadow to shadow, and cave
entrances offered not security but fear.

All
converged to black, black unmitigated by candleflames or woodsmoke. Each night
a drama commenced, in languages even Danilo could not always understand.
Outside of the little upland basins called
poljes,
where were the
village folk who had so carefully avoided them in the light—where, among
these limestone wastes, were there even villages? Not a soul remained outdoors
after dark to gather, kindle, cook, or husband—all community withdrew to
dens, tunneling, the dorsal indifference of the beast. The still surfaces of
mountain ponds reflected starlight of white gold, now and then obscured by whatever
was abroad in this mineral desert.

One
evening, just before sunset, they looked up at the wall of mountains, and all
the way to the ridgeline there were these strange patches of light, everywhere,
too bright for snow yet not orange or red enough for fire, as great sheets of
glowing vapor swept the valley beneath, and against the reflection in the river
of this incandescent passage, erect on an ancient bridge, above its pure arch
in silhouette, stood a figure, cloaked, solitary, unmoving, not waiting, not beckoning,
not even regarding the spectacle up on the mountainside, yet containing in its
severe contours a huge compressed quantity of attention, directed at something
Cyprian and Danilo couldn’t see, though presently they understood that they
ought to have.

They were caught
one night on a nameless black
mountainside, by a storm that had descended from the north and a premonitory
silence. Danilo, a citydweller all his life, looked around, as if expecting an
umbrellavendor to appear.

   
“
Djavola!
this weather!”

“Unless
you’re British,” Cyprian pointed out, “then it’s almost like home, yes quite
cozy actually
. . . .
Do you think
we’ve lost them by now?”

“They’ve
lost us. Driven us up here, where the mountain can do the work for them. Saves
them bullets, too. “

They
had come to a fearful halt, pressed against the iceslick rock risen uncounted
ages ago as if just for this hour
. . . .
There
was no light from anywhere. They knew the terrain opened everywhere into
ravines whose walls dropped straight down. Neither knew the way down off this
fierce black precipice.

When
he tripped and fell, Cyprian for the first time was delivered into an embrace
that did not desire him, as he became only another part of the mechanical
realm, the ensouled body he had believed in until now suddenly of far less
account than mass and velocity and cold gravity, here before him, after him,
despite him. As the storm roared all around, he slowly struggled to his knees
and, finding no pain beyond the expected, to his feet. Danilo had vanished.
Cyprian called, but the storm was too loud. He didn’t know which direction to
start looking in. He stood in rain just at the edge of sleet and considered
praying.

   
“Latewood.”

Not
far. Carefully, night and stormblind, Cyprian moved toward the voice. He came
upon a drenched and broken animal presence he could not see.

   
“Don’t
touch anything. I think my leg is broken.”

   
“Can
you—”

“I
can’t stand on it—just tried.” Long ago, in rented rooms, shadows of
colonnades, public gardens, bourgeois amenities of a world at peace, Cyprian
had come to imagine himself gifted at hearing the residues of truth behind the
lies everyone tells in the dark. Here, now, in this less compromised blackness,
what he heard from Danilo was too plain. “You must bring me out,” the barely
covert voice said—without the possibility of another meaning. “We must
use this.” It was an ancient Mauser they had found in an empty house back down
the mountainside.

   
“But
we’ll need it for—”

Patiently,
Danilo explained. Cyprian took off his coat, which was nearly blown from his
grasp, and then his shirt, the cold hitting him like a streetbrute indifferent
to anything he might have appealed with, tore the shirt into strips and
attempted with fingers rapidly losing all sensation to tie the rifle to
Danilo’s broken leg for a splint. “Can you straighten it?” Icepoints were now
being driven horizontally at their faces.