Against the Day (183 page)

“The difficulty with these gas
schemes,” said Coombs, “is that one sows these sinister fields and then, oddly
often, forgets. An advance turns into a retreat, and in the course of falling
back one then may be quite classically hoist by one’s own petard. This one is
also somewhat vague as to operational mode. Remotely operated? Electrical?
triggered by the weight of a tank or a human foot? launched into the altitudes
like skyrockets, where they then burst in silent invisible clouds?”

Cyprian
had been closely scanning the map with a Coddington lens. “Here then, the
linesegment of interest seems to be labeled ‘Critical Line’— Yashmeen,
isn’t that Riemann talk?”

She looked. “Except that this one’s
horizontal, and drawn on a grid of latitude and longitude, instead of real
against imaginary values—where Riemann said that all the zeroes of the
ζfunction will be found.”

Cyprian happened then to be watching
her face just as she said not “would” but “will,” and noted the innocent
expression of faith—there was no other word for it, was there?—eyes
for the rare moment as unnarrowed as they would ever be, lips vulnerably apart,
that saintinapainting look he usually saw only while she was being seen to by
Reef. The Zeta function might be inaccessible to her now as a former lover. He
would never understand the blessed thing, yet it had had the extraordinary
capacity to claim her mind, her energies, a good part of her life. She saw him
looking, and her eyes tightened again. But the deed had been done on his heart,
and for the hour he did not see how he could ever live without her.

He turned back to his scrutiny of the
map. After a bit, “Here’s another odd sort of note, in very small italic print.
‘Having failed to learn the lessons of that now mythical time—that
pleasures would have to be paid for in later years again and again, by
confronting situations like the present one, by negotiating in damaged coin
bearing imperial faces too worn to be expressive of any fineness of
emotion—thus has the Belgian Congo descended into its destiny.
’ ”

   
“What,”
Reef asked pleasantly,
“doesthat
mean?
”

“Remember, everything on this map
stands for something else,” Coombs De Bottle said.
“ ‘
Katanga,’ here, could be Greece. ‘Germans’ could as well be
the Austrians. And here,” pointing into the middle of the map, “our current
focus of concern, this relatively small area, undefined in previous
communications—”

“ ‘
. . .having recently undergone a
change of administrative status,
’ ”
Cyprian read through the magnifying device.

   
“Novi
Pazar?” Ratty speculated.

   
“How’s
that, Reg?”

Ratty,
who found he still liked to talk shop, shrugged in a diffident way. “Persistent
longstanding nightmare I suppose. Unpleasantness develops with Turkey, say over
Macedonia, Turkish forces have to be taken out of Novi Pazar for deployment
southward, and we know that at least three Serbian divisions are poised to
march in and occupy the Sanjak. Which would not be kindly regarded by Austria,
who would in fact be all too eager to intervene in an armed sort of way,
obliging the usual assortment of Powers then to come piling on—”

   
“General
European war.”

   
“The
very phrase.”

“Well?” Yashmeen said, “why not let
them have their war? Why would any selfrespecting Anarchist care about any of
these governments, with their miserable incestuous stew of kings and Caesars?”

“Selfinterest,” said Ratty.
“Anarchists would be the biggest losers, wouldn’t they. Industrial
corporations, armies, navies, governments, all would go on as before, if not
more powerful. But in a general war among nations, every small victory
Anarchism has struggled to win so far would simply turn to dust. Today even the
dimmest of capitalists can see that the centralized nationstate, so promising
an idea a generation ago, has lost all credibility with the population.
Anarchism now is the idea that has seized hearts everywhere, some form of it
will come to envelop every centrally governed society—unless government
has already become irrelevant through, say, family arrangements like the Balkan
zadruga.
If a nation wants to preserve itself, what other steps can it
take, but mobilize and go to war? Central governments were never designed for
peace. Their structure is line and staff, the same as an army. The
national
idea
depends on war. A general European war, with every striking worker a
traitor, flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled, would be just
the ticket to wipe Anarchism off the political map. The national idea would be
reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from
the swamp of the ruined Europe.

“I wonder if this isn’t Renfrew and
Werfner’s
‘
Interdikt
’
field
again, running across the Peninsula, waiting to be triggered.”

   
“Then,”
Reef figured, “somebody’d need to go out and disarm it.”

“Phosgene decomposes violently if
it’s exposed to water. That might be the simplest way, though failing that, one
might set it off before it could do any harm, which might prove a bit stickier
. . . .
”

“How could it be set off and not do
harm?” Yashmeen protested. “According to the map, unless the map is a bad
dream, it runs straight across the heart of Thrace. This thing is terrible.
Terrible.” Jenny and Sophrosyne looked over attentively, possibly recognizing
behind her voice the silent interior conversation she had been engaged upon
since they had all met. Ratty and Reef stood in a corner puffing on cigars,
gazing politely. Cyprian, however, had detected the same note as the women,
having kept since Yashmeen’s first announcement of her pregnancy a running log
of every gram of weight gain and distribution, changes in her face, the flow of
her hair when she moved and how it gave back the light, how she slept and what
she ate or didn’t eat, her lapses into vagueness and episodes of temper, as
well as variables so personal he entered them in code. He was in no doubt as to
why she wanted to go on this mission, and whom she thought she would be saving.

Close observation and silent concern
being one thing, and free advice quite another, the time came nonetheless when
Cyprian felt he really ought to say something to her. “Are you crazy?” was how
he approached the topic. “You can’t seriously mean to have a baby out there.
It’s primitive. It might as well be the jungle. You’ll need to be near
competent medical help
. . . .
”

She wasn’t angry, she rather beamed
as if wondering what had taken him so long. “You’re still living in the last
century, Cyprian. All the nomadic people of the world know how to have babies
on the go. The world that is to be. We are out here, in it. Look around, old
Cyprian.”

“Oh, I see, now I’m somehow to get
all swotted up on modern midwifery, is that it?”

“Well it wouldn’t do you any harm,
really, would it.” He looked so perplexed, not to mention crestfallen, that she
laughed and took his little chin in the old commanding way. “Now, we’re not to
have any difficulties over this, I hope.”

Just after his
return
from Bosnia,
Cyprian had sworn to himself that he would never go back to the Balkan
Peninsula. When he allowed himself to imagine inducements—sexual,
financial, honorific—that might get him to change his mind, he was
puzzled to find there was nothing the world could plausibly offer that he
wanted enough. He tried to explain to Ratty. “If the Earth were alive, with a
planetshaped consciousness, then the ‘Balkan Peninsula’ might easily map on to
whatever in this consciousness most darkly wishes for its own destruction.”

   
“Like
phrenology,” Ratty supposed.

“Only some form of madness would take
anyone east, right now, into the jaws of what’s almost certainly on the move
out there. I don’t suppose you people would have any assignments available to a
fairsized city, such as, oh, Paris, where the less bourgeois choices are easier
to make and certainly not as hazardous to pursue?”

“Now
then,” Ratty perhaps recognizing a rhetorical component, “you know you’re the
closest thing we have to an Old Balkan Hand.”

Since
the moment in Salonica at the Mavri Gata when he discovered that Danilo’s
cousin Vesna, far from a figure of despair and selfdelusion, had been
altogether real, and that anything was therefore possible again including, and
why not, marching off to Constantinople and creating a new world, Cyprian had
begun to “relax into his fate,” as he put it. Once he would have been reckoning
up, anxiously, how much remained to him of youth, looks,

desirability, and whether it would
get him at least to the next station of the pilgrimage, but that—he knew
now, knew as if with some inner certitude— was no longer quite the point,
and in any case would take care of itself. The young and desirable must carry
on as they always had, but without little C.L., it seemed.

Yet antiBalkan Peninsula vows taken
in some heat might after all, it seemed, be modified. “How would we go in?”
Cyprian asked, as if interested only in a technical way.

Ratty nodded and beckoned over a
cheerful individual who had been eating bouillabaisse as if he had just
received word of some looming fish shortage. “Say hello to Professor Sleepcoat,
who will now play you an interesting piece on the piano.”

The Professor went over to the Pleyel
by the window and quickly ran an octave scale on the white keys from F to F.
“Recognize that?”

“Catchy tune,” Cyprian said, “but
it’s not quite right, is it.” The Professor started to play it again. “There!”

“Exactly—it’s this B natural,”
banging on it two or three times. “Should be flatted. Once it was actually a
forbidden note, you know. You’d get your knuckles rapped for playing it. Worse
than that, if it happened to be during the Middle Ages.”

   
“So
it’s one of the old church modes.”

“Lydian. In the folk songs and dances
of the Balkan villages, as it happens, although the other mediaeval modes are
well represented, there is this strange and drastic absence of Lydian
material—in our own project, to date, we’ve found none at all. Bit of a
mystery for us. As if it were still forbidden, perhaps even feared. The
interval which our awkwardly unflatted B makes with F was known to the ancients
as ‘the devil in the music.’ And whenever we play it for anyone out there, even
whistle it, it seems they either run away screaming or assault us physically.
What could it be they’re hearing, that’s so unacceptable?”

   
“Your
plan,” Cyprian guessed, “is to go out there and find the answer to that.”

“Also to look into some rumors
recently of a neoPythagorean cult who regard the Lydian with particular horror.
Not surprisingly, they tend to favor the socalled Phrygian mode, quite common
through the region.” He addressed the keyboard again. “E to E on the white
keys. Notice the difference. It happens to coincide with a lyre tuning that
some attribute to Pythagoras, and may be traceable all the way back to Orpheus
himself, who was a native of Thrace, after all, and was eventually worshipped
there as a god.”

“In view,” added Yashmeen, “of the
similarity, if not identity, between Pythagorean and Orphic teachings.”

The Professor’s eyebrows went up.
Yashmeen felt it only fair to mention her former connection with the T.W.I.T.

 
“It
would
be
ever so jolly,” pouring a bistro glass brimful of local Jurançon
white, “to have an exneoPythagorean along on this jaunt of ours. Insights as to
what the T.W.I.T.’s Balkan counterparts might be thinking and so forth.”

   
“If
they exist.”

   
“Oh,
but I believe they do.” Touching her sleeve briefly.

“Fascination alert,” muttered
Cyprian. He and Reef were long familiar with the scenario that developed among
those meeting Yashmeen for the first time. Surely as sociable hours rotate and
contract to the wee variety, initial fascination, as the evening progressed,
would turn gradually to intimidation and bafflement.

“I’ll be in the bar,” said Reef.
YzlesBains was in fact one of the few places on the continent of Europe where a
sober Anarchist could find a decent Crocodile—equal amounts of rum,
absinthe, and the grape spirits known as
troissix
—a traditional
Anarchist favorite, which Loïc the bartender, a veteran of the Paris Commune,
claimed to have been present at the invention of.

So the idea
—“whose” idea was a meaningless
question around here—was for them to be deployed into Thrace among a
party of less than worldly songgatherers, out late in the European twilight,
far from safety, accosting local peasantry and urging them to sing or play
something their grandparents had sung or played to them. Though Professor
Sleepcoat seemed unconnected to the politics of the day, it had filtered in to
him at least that since about 1900, searches for musical material were being
undertaken in nations all over Europe, and one certainly could note in his
manner an edge of impatience, as if time were running out. “Bartok and Kodály
in Hungary, Canteloube in the Auvergne, Vaughan Williams in England, Eugénie
Lineff in Russia, Hjalmar Thuren in the Farøe Islands, on it goes, sometimes of
course simply because it’s possible, given the recent improvements in portable
sound recording.” But there was also an urgency abroad which no one in the
field would speak of, as if somehow the work had to be done quickly, before
each people’s heritage of song was somehow lost for good.