Against the Day (178 page)

It
being too much to expect arms dealers to ignore this sort of thing, who should
Kit find himself concocting a Champagne cocktail for one evening but the
distinguished Viktor Mulciber, last seen in an estaminet in Ostend five or six
years ago. He was using a different pomade on his hair, one even less subtle,
if possible, than before, filling incalculable cubic feet of otherwisetolerable
space with its chemically floral miasma. It became clear that Viktor remembered
Kit more as an engineer than a mathematician. “What is it that keeps you here?
You like the city? Is it a girl? A Greek bathhouse boy? The local hasheesh?”

   
“Keep
going,” Kit shrugged.

“Right
now, for engineers, it seems to be a seller’s market. Aviation in particular.
You have any background in that?”

“Göttingen.
Hung around some at Dr. Prandtl’s shop at the Applied Mechanics Institute. All
pretty theoretical.”

“Any
aircraft concern in the world would simply hand you a blank check, get down on
its knees, and beg in the most humiliating way possible that you name your price.”

Well,
the man was a drummer, though what he was trying to sell Kit was unclear.
“Anybody in particular?”

“Since
the air show in Brescia last year, Italy seems to be the place. Pilots like
Calderara and Cobianchi are designing their own machines, auto factories and
bicyclemakers are getting into the business.” He wrote an address on the back
of one of his cards. “This is in Turin, a good place to start.”

   
“Mighty
kind of you, sir.”

   
“No
need to grovel, lad, there’s a finder’s fee, and it’s good for business.”

Kit
would ordinarily have pocketed and lost the card, and gone on with his life in
the City, in oscillation between Europe and Asia, comfortable as a slow flap of
wings, except for what happened a few nights later. Headed home after his shift
at the Deux Continents, he was passing a
meyhane,
a roomful of drunks
and a Gypsy band audible from inside, when suddenly in a burst of resinous
smoke a young man came flying through the doorway into Kit’s path, nearly
knocking him over. After him came three others, two with drawn pistols, one
large enough not to need one. Kit had no idea who was who, but by some ancient
reflex to do with the odds, which didn’t appeal to him much, he drew his
Nagant, distracting the trio long enough to allow their target to slip away
down a narrow vaulted passage. The two pistolpackers went chasing off after
him—the third stood gazing. “We know where you work,” he said at last in
English. “You have stepped into the wrong argument. Be very careful now.”

Next
evening somebody picked his pocket. Seriously deranged street apes took to
leaping out at him from unsuspected angles.
Politissas
who used to roll
their eyes his way found excuses to look elsewhere. One night Jusuf the manager
took him aside.

“The
man whose life you thought you saved the other night,” he said, and made an
eloquent gesture of finality. “He was an enemy of the C.U.P. Now you are, too.”
He handed Kit a wad of Turkish pounds and a train ticket as far as BudaPesth.
“Best I can do. Would you mind leaving your recipe for the cocktail you
invented?”

“ ‘
Love in the Shadows of Pera,
’ ”
Kit said. “It’s just Creme de Menthe
and beer.” Next thing he knew here he was in Szeged up to the same hollow
heroics. Except for Dally, of course.

Not
sure who was after them or, in Kit’s case, why, they kept on the move till they
had found their way past the city limits, along a little irrigation canal,
lined with willows and into a paprika field.

“Where were you headed for anyway?”
she got around to asking. “Paris? England?”

   
“Italy,”
Kit said. “Venice.”

In
the instant she remembered the promise she’d more or less inveigled him into
making year before last sometime, but she didn’t quite dare to bring it up now.
Seeing how she hadn’t exactly waited for him. What’d she been thinking of,
leaving Venice? she must’ve been crazy. He was looking at her as if to
say— and then, what do you know, he did say, “You don’t remember, I bet.”

She
pretended to gaze at the paprika fields ripening to a red no match for her
hair—or lips, for that matter (it was occurring now to Kit)—and
tried to think back to the last time she’d felt so wobbly on her feet. “Course
I remember.”

They
were already too close not to turn and slide into an embrace smooth as the
solution to a puzzle. There in the silence before the clamoring weeks of
harvest would take over the fields, with the pepper pods stirring audibly in
the hot lowland breezes, they found to no one’s surprise but their own how far
ahead of them their bodies had been, how impatient with the minds that had been
keeping them apart.

   
“If
this is a bad idea, I mean, your dress in all this dirt—”

“Oh,
it’s terrific dirt,” she informed him between kisses, “feels good, smells good
. . .
look at all these peppers here, they
love it. . . it’ll wash out, why are you even
. . .
oh, Kit. . .”

Who
by now, his pants down and his shoes still on, had entered, and reentered, and
so forth, and the cycle, now exclusively theirs, wet, high, and headlong,
whirled away from time as other lessurgent lovers might have known it, until
presently, calm for the moment, refusing ever to uncouple, they lay in warm
semirefuge from the midday sun, in the light and shade between the rows of low
plants and the smell of the earth.

When
she remembered how to talk, “Where’ve you been, Siberia or someplace?”

   
“As a
matter of fact. . .”

   
“Tell
me later.”

They
got as far as a little grove of acacias before they had to start kissing, and
presently fucking, again. “Must be all this paprika,” Kit speculated.

Then
somehow they were back in Szeged and booking into a threeandahalfkroner room at
the GrandHôtel Tisza.

“For
young English
újházaspár,
”
loudly
announced Miklós the desk clerk, ignoring all the agricultural smudges and
handing over a pair of tickets, “compliments of this Hotel! Wonderful show
tonight at the Varosi Színház! The incomparable Béla Blaskó, our famous actor
from Lugos, singing and

dancing in a new operetta straight from Vienna! If only you
had been here

last week to see Béla as Romeo”—producing a local
newspaper and opening it to the theater review—“look, they said ‘fiery. .
. passionately loving . . .’ but—no need to tell you two, eh?”

   
“Well,”
Kit demurred.

   
“Oh,
c’mon,” Dally said mischievously, “it’ll be fun.”

As
it turned out, it was a pretty good show, though they didn’t quite catch the
whole thing. They did make sure to have an early supper beforehand, just up the
riverside promenade from the Színház at the CaféRestaurant Otthon. Instead of a
menu, a telepathic waiter named Pityu brought them wine and bread and bowls
filled with some miraculous combination of fish, paprika, and green peppers.

   
“This
can’t just be soup,” she said, “what on earth is it?”

“Hálaszlé,”
said Pityu, “only here in Szeged, three kinds of fish, all just pulled out of
the river there.”

   
“And
you knew—”

“I
know everything,” he laughed, “or maybe it is nothing, my English gets strange
sometimes. But your friends Imi and Ernö have gone back to BudaPesth, so you
don’t have to worry about them at least.”

“Then
you must know I’m not a Zaharoff girl either,” said Dally, exercising her
eyelashes.

“My
mother, who still lives in Temesvár, would say your destiny is much more
demanding than that.”

The operetta
, all the rage in Vienna at the
moment, was called
The Burgher King,
in which the ruler of a fictional
country in Central Europe, feeling disconnected from his people, decides to go
out among them disguised as a member of the urban middle class.

   
“Why
not as a peasant, Your Highness? a Gypsy, maybe a laborer?”

   
“One
requires a certain level of comfort, Schleppingsdorff. If one spent one’s whole
day working and sleeping, there would be no time for observation, let alone
thought. . . would there.”

Notable
among the jolly drinking songs and sentimental love ballads was the rousing
waltz which had rapidly become an anthem for Viennese windowshoppers—

Machen wir einen Schaufensterbummel,

Überwerfen sie irgendwas Fummel, auf

Straßen und Gassen, lass uns nur
laufen

Alles anstarren,
aber nichts kaufen
. . . .

On one of these merry showwindow strolls, the camouflaged
monarch meets and falls in love with a horrible little bourgeoise, Heidi, who
of course happens to be married. Royal advisers fly into a panic in the form of
a trio, sung
molto agitato.
One of them, Schleppingsdorff, decides to
disguise
himself
as well and pretend to romance the soubrette, the
H.L.B.’s best friend, Mitzi. Unfortunately, it is Heidi with whom
Schleppingsdorff is immediately fascinated, while Mitzi, already obsessed with
the Burgher King, goes through the motions of returning Schleppingsdorff’s
attentions, just so she can be close to the B.K. and pounce at the first sign
of trouble, which she tries to bring about by encouraging Schleppingsdorff in
his pursuit of Heidi. Meanwhile the comic basso, the husband, Ditters, runs to
and fro trying to figure out what his wife is up to, quite soon becoming insane
from the effort. It is all great fun.

The
first act closed with young Béla Blaskó, playing the Burgher King, wearing a
silk hat at a rakish angle and twirling a cane, in front of a corps of dancers
and singers ~ perfoming the peppy

No need for feeling so down,

Just spend a nightonthetown,

ThatDanube won’t, lookso blue—

not if you do, like I do—

Just get on outtothe
ucca,

Take a stroll up—the avenue,

You’ll find that city beat putsa

—Syncopation inyour shoe,

Findoneofthose

AustroHungarian ladies,

So superficially deep,

Down where the gigolos creep,

Too full of rhythm to sleep,

Allyouneed’sa

Goodtime girl from the К and K,

Who can’t tell you if it’s night or
day,

And slip away on a cruise, from

Those AustroHungarian blues!

Which by the firstact curtain had
Dally mesmerized into some peculiar wideeyed state.

   
“Ain’t
like I never saw a charming leading man before, seen ’em come and

go, but this lad is the goods, I tell you—and
Hungarian, too!”

   
Kit
guessed so. “But what’s with that piece of business where he bites old Heidi’s
neck, what was that all about?”

“Something
they do in these parts? You’re the one with the college education.” Her look
just short of what you’d call innocent.

Kit
peered back, trying to resist the nitwit smile that was about to take over his
face. “Well, hard to say, you know, my Hungarian being a little rusty and all,
but. . . didn’t it look to you like that she was, sort of
. . .
going for it?”

“What. Having her neck bitten.”
Slipping she was sure she didn’t know why into her countryweekend mode of
English accent.

   
“Well
here, let’s just—”

“Kit
now what’n ’e hell are you—” But sweeping her hair somehow out of the way
and lengthening her bare neck for him. At some point they became aware that the
show had resumed, the Burgher King and his associates up to the usual tuneful
intrigue.

Kit
and Dally were sitting in a box, and nobody seemed to be watching them. She
slipped to her knees and began getting rouge and saliva all over his trousers.
His fingers were deep in her hair. Their pulsebeats were hammering louder than
the music. “This is crazy,” whispered Kit.

“Come
on,” she agreed. They got back to the room with no more than a bellhop’s
presentation of a bushel of gladioli and the usual garment fastenings to slow
them down. For the first time it seemed Kit had a minute to admire her in her
full rangy nakedness and glow. But only a minute, because she had run at him,
borne him to the bed, straddled and begun to ride him in an extended episode of
heat, laughing, cursing, hollering in some language of her own that Kit was too
carried away to translate. Presently she had collapsed forward into a long
kiss, her undone hair surrounding them in a fiery nimbus.