Against the Day (163 page)

“I
can, but I’m not sure I want to.” Even through his numb hands, Cyprian could
feel the wrongness. Hands tuned to the musculature of limbs, the refined
appreciation of bodily perfection, now found themselves failing before the need
to put right this insult. “Do it,” Danilo shouted angrily against the wind.
There was no reason out here not to cry as loudly as he must for the pain.
“
En tu kulo Dio!
”

With
the rifle butt under his armpit, Danilo found he could hobble short distances,
at least at first. But the going was too slow, it hurt too much, and before
long Cyprian found himself supporting Danilo’s weight again. He knew they had
to follow divides till they came to a major ravine and then de

scend to the streambed and keep heading downhill till they
found human habitation. Before they froze to death. That was the theory anyway.
But shelter, any pocket of calm air in which a flame might last long enough to
take hold, a ledge wide enough for five minutes of sleep, none of these
domestic pleasantries were about to appear. There was frostbite to consider, at
every step, every change in the wind. If they even stopped moving, they would
freeze. Moving was the key, arrival at a place of safety was for now a luxury
too remote to think about. Wolves called to one another, as if keeping track of
an evening menu considerately delivered among them. Occasionally, when the
storm had passed, there would be moonlight to pick up and set aglow a pair of
interested eyes. Only long enough for the creature to turn its head to a
different angle, as if not wishing to reveal its gaze for too long. By now
Danilo was running a fever. His weight slowly grew toward the absolute inertia
of a corpse. Sometimes, unaccountably, he would no longer be there.

“Where
are you?” Cyprian could feel the wind taking his voice away into its vast
indifference.

   
“Where
are you?” he cried. He wished, terribly, for no answer.

The rain blew
down the valley, at the verge of
snow, stinging, thin, a white European rover with vicious intentions.

“I’d
been expecting, I don’t know, a weekend in the country sort of thing,” Cyprian
said.
“ ‘
Snow? not to worry, mean
temperature in Sarajevo is fifty degrees Fahrenheit, a light ulster should do
the trick.’ Fucking Theign, thanks ever so much.”

They
had found a very small village, an accretion of stonework hanging from the side
of a mountain, and had been allowed to winter there. One passed from one
chamber to another, some of them roofed, some not, by way of rough stairs and
archways, snowpierced tunnels, muddy courtyards, whose construction, beginning
long ago with a single farm shed, had extended over centuries. Bittercold sleet
and snow, windborne, raced among the ravines, wailed among the tiles of the
roofs. The other side of the valley was often invisible, clouds descended in
salients sharply run like the defenses of a walled town, all color disappeared,
the summer was a country of wistful legend, no longer real or recoverable. Wet
dogs, descended from ancestors who had lived here during the Dark Ages,
recalling sunned walls in whose shade they had once lain, now sought the
uncertainties of indoor life. There were lignite workings across the valley,
Cyprian could smell it when the wind was right, and now and then it was
possible to cross over with a donkey and

scavenge some, an allday task in the
best of weather and usually extending over a night or two—but what
preoccupied the residents most was the location of firewood caches—these
were more like hoarded treasure as the season deepened, and village opinion
held it legitimate to kill, at least aim and shoot at, anyone who took wood not
his own. The smell of woodsmoke anywhere among the stone bafflework was an
outward sign of some family event kept otherwise inside shutters of silence.
“She thinks she’s cold again,” they nodded, or, “Snežana is boiling more
potatoes. There can’t be too many left by now.”

At
first from fever, then in long calm descents to sleep, as he slowly began to
mend, Danilo began to talk about Salonica, the city of his youth, the women by
the fountains in the mornings, his mother’s pastel de kwezo, parades in the
streets of wrestlers and Gypsy musicians, the allnight cafés. “At first I tried
to get back there as often as I could, but responsibilities in Sarajevo piled
up, and one day I woke to find I’d become a Bosniak. I wish I could show it to
you someday, Latewood, Salonica is all the world in a single city, and you must
meet my cousin Vesna, she sings in a hasheesh joint down in the Bara, you’ll
love her as I do
. . . .
”

Cyprian
blinked politely. No questions of desire, either between themselves or for
third parties, had ever arisen—it might have been the general exhaustion
the young men both had to fight moment by moment, or their simple discovery
that neither was the other’s sort, or, strangest of all, that in some scarcely
acknowledged way, Cyprian had become Danilo’s mother. He was surprised to find
emerging in his character previously unsuspected gifts, notably one for soup,
as well as an oftenabsurd willingness to sacrifice all comfort until he was
satisfied that Danilo would be safe for another spell, however brief.

This
first encounter with release from desire brought Cyprian the unexpected delight
of a first orgasm. He was sitting up in a black and thickly clouded night,
tending to Danilo’s sleep, as if he must be prepared in an instant to intervene
if needed, to walk the other man’s painscapes of dream or delirium. All at
once, no not all at once, more like the way one wakes sometimes very slowly to
the awareness there is light in the room, he found that for some undefined time
now he had not even been imagining desire, its arousal, its fulfillment, any
occasion for it. The imbalance he was used to experiencing as a numb space in
the sensorium of the day, as if time were provided with sexual nerves, a patch
of which had been waiting unaddressed, was, somewhat mysteriously, no longer
there—it was occupied by something else, a clarity, a general freshening
of temperature
. . . .

Of
course it passed, the way a pulse of desire itself will, but the odd thing was
that he found himself always unexpectedly trying to locate it again, as if it
were something at least as desirable as desire.

Danilo
was getting about quite well on a stick with the head of a wolf for a handle,
carved over the winter from mountain ash for him by his friend Zaim. He came in
one day to find Cyprian cutting up potatoes, winter carrots and onions to put
into a soup, and for the first time they talked about their passage through the
mountains.

   
“It
was luck,” Cyprian shrugged. “We were lucky.”

   
“It
was the will of God,” Danilo said.

   
“Which
of your several Gods would that be, again?”

   
“There
is only God.”

Cyprian
was nowhere near as certain. But seeing the usefulness of remaining attached to
the day, he only nodded and went on chopping up vegetables.

When they got
back
again to steel and
parallel tracks, they found the lines nervous with an all but mortal appetency,
bands of irregulars carrying ancient long rifles whose brass fittings were
incised with holy verses from the Quran, Bosnian Catholic units with
Mannlichers furnished by their Austrian masters, Turkish guerrillas heading for
Constantinople and the revolution at home, Austrian regular army swarming at
the frontiers, stopping everyone, with no indulgence shown English tourists,
which was what Cyprian had been hoping to pass for, or even German ones, who
were there in numbers, as if to witness some godless spectacle, a passion play
without a Christ.

It
is in the nature of prey, Cyprian was later to reflect, that at times, instead
of submitting to the demands of some predator, they will insist upon being
difficult. Running for their lives. Putting on disguises. Disappearing into
clouds of ink, miles of bush, holes in the earth. Even, strange to tell,
fighting back. Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of
bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception,
poison and surprise.

The
important thing in considering disguises, Cyprian supposed, was not to look
Russian. It wasn’t that the skills he needed came to him suddenly by any
special providence—there was little this time out he had not done before.
At BosnaBrod he was obliged, from within a toilette whose relation to any sort
of taste was better left unexplored, to play the part of a civilservice wife,
contemptuous of all that was not English, demanding in a shrill tessitura to be
allowed through to reunite with a husband for whom, though fictional, Cyprian
was carefully able to suggest less than complete adoration,

while carrying on a tirade against all things Bosnian, the
accommodations, the food—“Whose idea was this muttonandspinach horror?”
“Is kapama, is good, eh?”—even, as if forgetting how risky it might
prove, the men—“What possible maiden’s prayer can you be thinking
yourselves the answer to, with those ridiculous baggy trousers and headscarves
. . .” the odd tiling being that these particular irregulars were as handsome
and muscular as once upon a time anyone could have desired
. . .
but it was more important to locate
all the firearms, visible and otherwise, likely to be hostile, a matter of
minutes, and to choose—almost, by now, automatically, more than one
likely avenue of escape
. . .
at
times he invoked the opposite of disguise and withdrew into a fatalistic
submissiveness so complete that after he and Danilo had passed by, no one even
remembered seeing them, though by then Danilo’s injury had reasserted itself,
along with his despair. There were hours in their passage Cyprian wanted to cry
for the other man’s suffering but knew with the absence of mercy peculiar above
all to prey that survival, in cases like theirs, did not lie in the direction
of sentiment.

At
Belgrade they found both rivers under interdiction. It made Cyprian that much
more angrily determined to get out. In latewinter fog, among domes and spires
of rusted iron and stone, oversize angels, broken, defaced, but still standing
in hilltop isolation, their faces strangely, carefully specific, Danilo and
Cyprian moved south through Serbia but learned presently that all roads over
the mountains to the coast would be snowed in for weeks yet.

In Pljevlje they
stopped
for a day just
to get their bearings. There was snow on the brown heights. It was a small
pretty town with four minarets and one campanile and the Pasha’s
konak
sprawling
across the foothills. Austrian garrisons were in the process of pulling out, as
they were all through the
Sanjak
of Novi Pazar, as part of a bargain
with Turkey over the annexation—blue masses fragmented by snow falling
intermittently, lines passing radially one by one, as if some great apocalyptic
wheel had begun at last to turn
. . .
clutchplates
slamming into engagement, chattering drafts of youngsters in illfitted uniforms
marched off into general dusk.

“If we could find a way to get to
Kossovska Mitrovitsa,” Danilo reckoned, “eighty, maybe a hundred miles, we
could catch a train south to Salonica.”

“Your childhood home,” Cyprian
recalled. “Your cousin Vesna and whatnot.”

   
“Years.
Until now it has not felt like exile.”

   
Back
in January, Austria’s reptilian foreign minister Aerenthal had finally got a
concession from the Sultan to build a line from the Bosnian border,

through the
Sanjak,
to the Turkish railhead at
Kossovska Mitrovitsa. Now it lay there, this notional railway not yet built,
invisible across the snow and passes and valleys, an element of diplomacy
waiting to enter material existence.

Cyprian
and Danilo followed it as best they could. They rode with sutlers and camp
followers, the phantom rollingstock of military and farm wagons, mostly their
own damaged feet, till one day they saw minarets, and Turkish barracks on a
hill rising behind an unremarkable town, and that was Kossovska Mitrovitsa.

They
boarded a physical or material train and rattled south, shivering with the
winter damp, creaking and toppling in and out of sleep, as if drugged,
indifferent to food, smoke, alcohol
. . . .
All
the way down through Macedonia, past stations of pilgrimage, finding shrines
and sacred places deserted, the wind blowing through, the station platforms
desolate, Cyprian was gazed at now and then, though not in any predictable way,
from crossing or trackside, in depot archways, as if by comradesinarms who had
shared an obscurely shameful reverse upon the field of honor—not an
outright defeat, but an incentive to withdraw from some engagement offered.
Destiny having advanced a pawn, the gambit had been declined, and the
despondency of the unsought went moaning in the wires down all the rightsofway,
beneath the Black Mountain of Skoplje, through the city itself, past Mount
Vodno, along the valley of the Vardar, through the wine country of the Tikves
Plain, through Demir Kapija, the Iron Gate, and all the way down to the Ægean,
to the end of the line, Salonica—where, out of the nicotine and hasheesh
mists of the Mavri Gata or Black Cat seamen’s tavern, unaccountably came
running a thin young woman with fair hair, who leapt on Danilo, embracing him
not only with arms but legs as well, screaming his name over and over.