Against the Day (164 page)

“This
is my cousin,” Danilo mentioned at last, when he had stopped sobbing enough to
talk. “Vesna.”

Once,
in another life, Cyprian would have replied in his most withering tones, “Of
course, charmed I’m sure,” but now he found himself possessed, mouth, eyes and
sinuses between, by a smile he could not control. He took her hand. “Your
cousin told me his family were here. I’m as happy as he is to see you. Possibly
more so.” The relief he felt was enough to make him start crying, too. Nobody
noticed.

Cyprian and
Danilo
had arrived at
Salonica to find the city still reverberating like a struck gong from the
events of the preceding spring and summer, when the Turkish sultan had been
obliged to restore the constitution,

and the insurgents known as the Young Turks had come to power
in their country. Since then Salonica had been running on nerve. The city
seethed with rudely awakened legions of transient riflemen, as if this ancient
scented spill of red roofs, domes, minarets, and cypresses down steep dark
hillsides were the flophouse of Europe. Everyone had assumed as written fate
that Salonica would fall under Austrian influence—for Vienna dreamed of
the Aegean the way Germans dreamed of Paris—when in fact it was the
chaste young revolutionaries of Turkey who had already set about reimagining
the place—“Enjoy the skyline while you may,” Danilo all but tearful, “the
mosqueless idea of a city is nearly upon us, dull, modern, orthogonal,
altogether lacking God’s mystery. You Northern people will feel right at home.”

Down
at the port, between the train station and the gas works, in the beer halls and
hasheesh bars of the Bara district, the girls were venal and intermittently
(but then strikingly) beautiful, the men dressed in flashy white or
pearlcolored turnouts and matching shoes whose spotlessness Cyprian understood
it would literally be worth his life to compromise or even to comment on aloud.

At
the Mavri Gata there was enough hasheesh smoke to confound an elephant. At the
end of the room, as if behind an iconostasis of song, oud, baglamas, and a kind
of hammered dulcimer called a santouri were being played without a break. The
music was feral, Eastern in scale, flatted seconds and sixths, and a kind of
fretless portamento between, instantly familiar though the words were in some
slurred jailhouse Greek that Danilo confessed to picking up only about one word
in ten of. In these nocturnal modalities, “roads,” as the musicians called
them, Cyprian heard anthems not of defined homelands but of release into
lifelong exile. Roads awaiting the worn sole, the ironbound wheel, and promises
of misery on a scale the military staff colleges were only beginning to contemplate.

Vesna
was a flame, a brilliant focus of cognizance known in this town as a
merakloú.
“
Tha spáso koúpes,
”
she
sang, “I will smash all the glasses and go out and get drunk because of how you
spoke to me
. . . .
” Knives and
pistols appeared from time to time, though some were only for sale. Eligible
customers were introduced to sleepingdrafts in their beer and robbed of
everything including their socks. Sailors deserted their meno’war for
streetsparrows who vowed to defy pimp or husband no matter how fatal the
consequences. Tough customers in from Constantinople on business sat at tables
in the back, smoking out of
argilés,
counting to themselves without
moving their lips, scanning every face that came and went. Their presence
(Cyprian was aware by way of Danilo) was not inseparable from the activities of
the Young Turkey Party and its Committee of Union and Progress, headquartered
here

in Salonica. There were things these
young idealists needed in the way of matériel, parts of town that must be gone
in and out of without molestation, that only “dervish boys” knew how to help
with. There were also the Germans, ubiquitously conferring with Committee
operatives, too saturated in entitlement to bother with altered identities,
simply being German, as if the value of emulation were too obvious to require
comment. Albanian children with heaps of koulouria on trays balanced firmly
atop perfectly flattened heads came running in and out. Glass broke, cymbals
were bashed repeatedly,
kombolói
clicked in dozens of rhythms, feet
stamped along with the music. Women danced the
karsilamás
together.

   
“
Aman,
”
Vesna cried, she
ululated,
“
amáaáaáan,
have
pity, I love you so
. . . .
”

   
She
sang of longing so deep that humiliation, pain, and danger ceased to matter.
Cyprian had left so much emotion behind that it took him all of eight bars to
understand that this was his own voice, his life, his slight victory over time,
returned to fair limbs and spring sunrises and a heart beating too fiercely for
reflection driving him toward what he knew he needed, could not live without.
Stin
ipochi,
as the song, too many of the songs, went—back in that day
. . .
what had happened? Where was desire,
and where was he, who had been almost entirely fashioned of nothing but desire?
He regarded the dawn outside the street door, the cyclic fate of one more
roomsize Creation assembled from scratch through the dark hours one mean blow,
petty extortion, faithless step at a time, a little world in which a city’s
worth of lives witlessly, gleefully, in its entire force, had been invested, as
it would be, night after night. It was the absence of all hesitation here that
impressed Cyprian, setting aside the ouzo and hasheesh whose molecular
products, occupying by now every braincell, discouraged careful analysis. It
was a world entirely possible to withdraw from angelwise and soar high enough
to see more, consider exits from, but nobody here in the smoke and breaking
waves of desire wanted exit, the little world would certainly do, perhaps in
the way that for some, as one of Vesna’s songs suggested, children, though also
small, though comparably doomed, are forever more than enough.

News had filtered
through at last on the status of the
annexation crisis and the doings of the great. The German ambassador had met
with the Tsar, bringing a personal note from the Kaiser, and shortly after that
the Tsar announced that on second thought the annexation of Bosnia would be
fine with him after all. The continent relaxed. The Tsar’s decision might have
had to do with the recently mobilized German divisions poised at the frontier
of Poland, though this was speculation, like everything else at this bot

tom dead center of the European Question, this bad daydream
toward which all had been converging, murderous as a locomotive running without
lights or signals, unsettling as points thrown at the last minute, awakened
from because of some noise out in the larger world, some doorbell or
discontented animal, that might remain forever unidentified.

If
Cyprian thought however briefly that now he might be entitled to some
relaxation, he was swiftly disabused. One night at the Mavri Gata, Danilo
showed up with a noodlethin and mournful Bulgarian whose name people were
either unable to pronounce or remember, or unwilling to utter aloud for fear of
certain Greek elements in town. Among the
dervisidhes,
because of his
appearance, he went by the name of Gabrovo Slim.

“It
is not the best time to be Bulgarian in Salonica,” he explained to Cyprian.
“The Greeks—not these
rembetes
in here but the politicals who work
out of the Greek embassy—want to exterminate us all. They preach in the
Greek schools that Bulgaria is the Antichrist. Greek agents work with the
Turkish police to make death lists of Bulgarians, and there is a secret society
here called ‘The Organization’ whose purpose is to carry out these
assassinations.”

   
“It
is about Macedonia, of course.” Cyprian said.

An
ancient dispute. Bulgarians had always thought Macedonia was part of Bulgaria,
and after the war with Russia so it became at last—for about four months
in 1878, till the Treaty of Berlin handed it back to Turkey. The Greeks
meanwhile believed it was part of Greece, invoking Alexander the Great, and so
forth. Russia, Austria, and Serbia were seeking to extend their influence in
the Balkans, and using the Macedonian Question as an excuse. And strangest of
all, there were those dominant figures in the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization—the I.M.R.O.—like Gotse Deltchev, who actually
believed that Macedonia belonged to the Macedonians themselves, and deserved to
be independent of all the powers. “Unfortunately,” Gabrovo Slim said, “I.M.R.O.
is split between the Deltchev people and others who are nostalgic for that
shortlived ‘Big Bulgaria’ as it was before the Treaty of Berlin.”

“And
your own thoughts on the matter?” Cyprian was already chuckling to himself.

“Ha!”
They laughed bitterly together for a while till the Bulgarian stopped abruptly.
“The Greeks think I’m I.M.R.O., is the problem.”

   
“
Oh
dear. And are you?”

“This close.” Gabrovo Slim held
forefinger and thumb about a centimeter apart, next to his right ear. “Last
night. There have been other attempts, but not quite like that.”

   
“I
told him how we got out of Bosnia,” said Danilo helpfully.

   
“Oh,
I’m the Scarlet Pimpernel, now, is that it?”

   
“It
is your destiny,” declared Vesna, who had been listening.

   
 
“
Tsoupra
mou,
you are my destiny.”

“
Here
is the plan
,”
said Cyprian next
evening, at the Café Mazlum down by the Quay, where it seemed the whole town
had turned out to hear the great Karakas Effendi sing. “You may have been
following the news out of Constantinople, political ferment and whatnot, and
noticed that many of our Turkish brothers here in Salonica have begun returning
to their capital in anticipation of some effort of larger scale to talk sense
to the Sultan. What you’ll do therefore is put on a fez—”

   
“No.
No. I’m an Exarch.”

   
“Danilo,
explain to him.”

“You’ll
put on a fez,” explained Danilo, “and, unnoticed in all the Turkish
excitability, board a train to The City, and once you get there,” he wrote on a
piece of paper and handed it over, “follow your nose to the spice bazaar in
Eminönu, just beyond that is the Stamboul quay—you’ll find this slip
number and ask to talk to Khalil. There are always Black Sea coasters going to
Varna.”

“If
I can even get out of Salonica, with all these Organization people watching.”

   
“We
will make sure I.M.R.O. are watching them.”

“Meanwhile,”
Cyprian said, “you and I must exchange hats and coats. When I leave here, they’ll
think I’m you. Although I must say your garments are not nearly as stylish as
what you’re getting in exchange. In case you think there’s not enough sacrifice
or something.”

So
it was that Cyprian, pretending to be Gabrovo Slim, shifted quarters up the
street to a
teké
called the Pearl of the Bara, and immediately noted an
improvement in his weekly budget, owing to a reduced outlay on “black stuff,”
as hasheesh was known among the dervish boys, since all he had to do was stand
for a minute or two out in the corridor and breathe until Orientalrug patterns
began to writhe across his field of vision in luminous orange and celestial
blue.

Though Vesna was
deeply involved
with a
gangster from Smyrna named Dhimitris, she and Cyprian said goodbye as if each
were a part of the other. He had no idea why. Danilo looked on with the
fatalistic respect of the

matchmaker for the laws of chance he must forever struggle
with. The boat’s steamhorn blasted out its final admonition.

   
“You
did a good thing,” said Danilo.

“The Bulgarian? I worry about that
one, I wonder if he’ll even get that fez on his head.”

   
“I
don’t think he’ll ever forget.”

“The important thing for him,”
Cyprian said, “is to be home again, among his people.”

They embraced, but that was the
formal version, for their embrace had happened long before.

On the way back
to Trieste
, Cyprian,
having had quite enough of railways for a while, took Aegean, Ionian, and
Adriatic coasters and mailsteamers, spending as much time as he could chatting,
smoking and drinking with the other passengers, as if alone he might be jumped
by something unwelcome. As if the linear and the quotidian, adhered to
faithfully enough, could save him, save everyone. At Kotor again, for no reason
he knew of, he debarked, having decided to pop up and have a quick look at
Montenegro. On the road up to Cetinje, he paused at a switchback to look back
down at Kotor, and understood how much he had wanted to be exactly here,
beholding exactly this lovely innocence of town and harbor betrayed to the
interests of warmaking, this compassionate denial of the vast cruelty of the
late Balkan winter, the sunlight beginning to return each day for a little more
than the five hours the mountains and the season had allowed it.