Against the Day (184 page)

“I’ll be the outrider I guess,” Reef
said, “though it wouldn’t hurt you two to be checked out on some kind of personal
hardware, just for backcovering purposes—and Cyprian, you’ll be doing the
navigating, and Yash, why I expect there’s some kinda chores we could find for
you
. . . .
”

Before becoming familiar with Reef’s
ideas of affectionate teasing, Yashmeen once would have reliably flown into
full wethen indignation at talk

like this. Now she only smiled formally and said, “Actually I
happen to be the true beating heart of this mission.” Which was so. Reef was
running as always on what, except for its lack of analysis, would’ve been class
hostility, but usually had more to do with how some suitwearing bastard
happened to’ve looked at him that day. Cyprian was absolutely without political
faith—if it couldn’t be turned into a quip, it wasn’t worth considering.
Yashmeen certainly was the one who shared most deeply the Anarchist beliefs
around here. She had no illusions about bourgeois innocence, and yet held on to
a limitless faith that History could be helped to keep its promises, including
someday, a commonwealth of the oppressed.

It was her old need for some kind of
transcendence—the fourth dimension, the Riemann problem, complex
analysis, all had presented themselves as routes of escape from a world whose
terms she could not accept, where she had preferred that even erotic desire
have no consequences, at least none as weighty as the desires for a husband and
children and so forth seemed to be for other young women of the day.

But lovers could not in general be
counted as transcendent influences, and history had gone on with its own
relentless timetable. Now at YzlesBains, though, Yashmeen wondered if she
hadn’t found some late reprieve, some hope of passing beyond political forms to
“planetary oneness,” as Jenny liked to put it. “This is our own age of
exploration,” she declared, “into that unmapped country waiting beyond the
frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of
the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to
report on what we’ve seen. What are any of these ‘utopian dreams’ of ours but
defective forms of timetravel?”

After a sendoff
party that went on all night, to be
remembered for an innocence in which everything was still untouched by cause
and effect, they came out into a stormy dawn and walked together arm in arm the
slick cobbles of the little streets, under pedestrian bridges and up and down
sets of steps in the wet light to their rooms to try and catch a few hours’
sleep before departure for the Peninsula.

Then they were on the train as the
points were thrown one by one, like a magician forcing a card on spectators not
sure how much they wanted to be fooled, for this time down the tracks none of
them was finding any way to enjoy the usual tourist’s suspension of disbelief
before a variety performance, it was no longer “travel,” really, but three
kinds of necessity.

   
And
it was not the sights out the windows of wintry speeding Europe so

much as the fucking that went on when the sleepingcarriage
shades were drawn. The old Orient Express fantasy available on any given night
in Europe at a musichall somewhere.

~Ouside Zagreb, as if she could sense
something wheeling to a close, Yashmeen, her beautiful ass elevated for Reef,
who had just entered her, beckoned Cyprian over and without preliminaries, for
the first time, took his penis, already achingly erect, into her mouth.

   
“Oh I
say Yashmeen, really that isn’t—”

She paused, disengaging her mouth for
a moment, and glared at him affectionately. “Pregnancy makes a woman do strange
things,” she explained. “Indulge me,” and recommenced sucking and, to his great
delight, biting too, at first gently but then with increasing severity, so that
it was not long before Cyprian was climaxing awed through this artfully
calibrated pain, with Reef, aroused by the sight, not far behind, hollering
“Whoopee!” as he was known to do. “Yes I should imagine,” Cyprian added, nearly
breathless.

“The rule,” she reminded him when it
seemed he was about to bring up the matter of roles and “places” later
approaching Beograd, “is that there are no rules.” At about which point, by
accident, of course, Cyprian happened to catch Reef’s eye.

   
“Don’t
get any ’cute ideas,” Reef said, immediately brusque.

“Well you do have an appealing
bottom,” Cyprian mused, “in an abbreviated, muscular sort of way
. . . .
”

“Damn,” Reef shaking his head, “there
goes
my
appetite. You two figure somethin out, I’m going down that
smokin salon, grab me a cheroot.”

“There’s ever such a nice panatela
right here,” Cyprian couldn’t help remarking, “all ready for you.”

“That? why, that ain’t even a Craven
A.” And Reef stalked out, not nearly as annoyed as he was pretending to be. For
Yash was right, of course. No rules. They were who they were, was all. For a
while now, anytime he and Yash happened to be fucking facetoface, she would
manage to reach around and get a finger, hell, maybe even two sometimes, up in
there, and he guessed it wasn’t always that bad. And to be honest he did wonder
now and then how it might be if Cyprian fucked him for a change. Sure. Not that
it had to happen, but then again
. . .
it
was shooting pool, he supposed, you had the straight shots, and cuts and
English that went with that, but around these two you also had to expect
caroms, and massés, and surprise balls out the corner of your eye coming back
at you to collide at ~unforseen angles, off of cushions sometimes you hadn’t
even
 
thought about, heading for
pockets you’d never’ve called
. . . .
  

   
And
the fact was that Reef, for all the chattering and silly ways, had grown

really fond of the kid. He had ridden with men,
nofoolinaround 100percent
machos
that were a hell of a lot more trouble
to get along with. Touchy, sentimental about the damndest things, cantina
music, animal stories, badmen pimping their wives with tears in their eyes as
they took the money, spend any time at all in company like this and either you
develop a vast patience or become violent.

What surprised him about the three of
them together—what he couldn’t understand really—was that he kept
waiting to feel jealous about something, having a personal history himself of
purely mean sumbitch ways when it came to these thirdparty situations, he
couldn’t tell you how many nights a lamp going out behind a window curtain or
some glimpse of two heads together in a buggy half a mile away had sent him
into some homicidal seizure. Waking up in some barrelhouse with vomit all in
his hair and not always his own vomit, either. But among the three of them
something was different, jealousy hadn’t ever figured into it, in some way never
could. Once he would’ve thought, well of course, how could a man ever get
jealous of a creampuff like Cyprian? But as he got to know him better, Reef saw
how Cyprian could handle himself when he had to, and it wasn’t all to do with
that Webley Reef knew he was packing. Once or twice, unexpectedly, he’d seen
Cyprian drop the pose of theatrical hysteria he used to get through the working
day on, and emerge into a region of cool selfcontrol—you could see him
straighten up and begin to breathe deliberately, as professional lurkers in the
shadows outside casinos, waiting for the incautious and selfsatisfied, faded
away muttering, or flâneurs commenting in dialect had fallen silent, lost their
grins, believing that Cyprian had understood every word, and not looking
forward to how personally he might want to take it.

In Beograd they
joined up
with Professor
Sleepcoat and his party, which included the technician Enrico, the student
volunteers Dora and Germain, and an accountant named Grunding who was there at
the University’s insistence owing to budget overruns on the last trip out here,
most of them in a column titled “Miscellaneous” whose details Professor
Sleepcoat could somehow not recall.

At
Sofia they all descended to the platform of the Tsentralna Gara to find a city
reimagined in the thirtyodd years since the Turks had been driven out, winding
alleyways, mosques, and hovels replaced with a grid of neat wide streets and
Europeanized public works on the grand scale. As they rode into town, Cyprian
stared in dismay at the Boulevard Knyaginya Mariya Luiza,

which seemed to be full of stray dogs
and serious drinkers in different stages of alcohol poisoning.

“It used to be much worse,” the
Professor assured him. “Arthur Symons called it the most horrible street in
Europe, but that was ages ago, and we all know how sensitive Arthur is.”

   
“Kind
of like Omaha,” it seemed to Reef.

The
next day Grunding went to the bank and stayed till closing time, and then the
party headed north, up into the hills.

Each
morning the accountant took a sack of silver Bulgarian leva and counted out
twentyfive of them. “This is only a quid,” objected the Professor. “All right,”
said Grunding, handing him the coins, “then that makes this a ‘quo.’ Try not to
spend it all in one place.”

“It’s
five dollars,” Reef said, “I don’t know what he’s complaining about.” Most of
the outlays were in smaller coins, nickel and bronze stotinki, for meals
usually on the run—kebabcheta, banichka, palachinki, beer—and
someplace to doss in the evenings. For a few stotinki, one could also find a
child eager to turn the crank that ran the recording device by way of reduction
gears and a flywheel that smoothed out variations in pitch. “Like pumping the
bellows of a church organ back in the last century,” it seemed to Professor
Sleepcoat. “Without all those anonymous urchins we wouldn’t have had Bach.”
Which got him a look from Yashmeen, who in other circs might’ve inquired
sweetly how much of Western culture throughout history did he think might
actually have depended on that sort of shamefully underpaid labor. But it was
not a discussion anybody had the leisure to get into any longer.

One
nightfall the Professor was out working late, when from up the valley he heard
someone singing in a young tenor voice, which at first he took for a typical
Transylvanian swineherd’s
kanástánc
that had found its way here somehow
seeping over ridgelines and fanning down watersheds. But presently another
young voice in a higher range, a girl’s, answered, and for the duration of the
twilight the two voices sang back and forth across the little valley, sometimes
antiphonal, sometimes together in harmony. They were goatherds, and the words
were in Shop dialect sung to a Phrygian melody he had never heard before, and
knew he would never hear again, not this way, unmediated and immune to Time.
Because what he could make out were words only the young had any right to sing,
he was unavoidably reminded of the passing of his own youth, gone before he’d
had a chance to take note of it, and thus was able to hear lying just beneath
an intense awareness of loss, as if the division between the singers were more
than the width of a valley, something to be

crossed only through an undertaking
at least as metaphysical as song, as if Orpheus might once have sung it to
Eurydice in Hell, calling downward through intoxicant fumes, across helically
thundering watercourses, echoing among limestone fantastically sculptured over
unnumbered generations by Time personified as a demiurge and servant of Death—
And the recording equipment, of course, and Enrico, were back at the inn. Not
that any recording was necessary, really, for the two singers had repeated the
song often enough, well into the onset of the night, for it to enter into the
grooves of Professor Sleepcoat’s memory, right next to the ones dedicated to
regrets and sorrows and so forth.

Later
the Professor seemed to have Orpheus on the brain. “He couldn’t quite bring
himself to believe in her desire to come back with him to live in the upper
world again. He had to turn around and look, just to make sure she was coming.”

   
“Typical
male insecurity,” Yashmeen sniffed.

“Typical
female lust for wealth wins out in the end, is the way I always read that one,”
commented Gruntling.

“Oh
he’s the Lord of Death, for goodness’ sake, there’s no money over there.”

   
“Young
woman, there is money everywhere.”

The main task
for Reef, Cyprian, and Yashmeen
right now was locating the
Interdikt
line, and disabling it. The
countryside was full of hints, deliberate misdirections—any mirage of
something unnaturally straight, shimmering across the terrain, could send them
off on fools’ errands to waste the precious hours. Townspeople were friendly
enough until Cyprian brought out the map—then they shifted their eyes
away and even began to tremble, conferring in dialects suddenly gone opaque.
The use of such terms as “fortification” and “gas” was hardly productive, even
with those untroubled enough to stop and chat. “You don’t look for them,” they
were often warned—“if they want to, they find you. Better if they don’t
find you.” At the fringes of these discussions, the good folk were averting
their faces, repeatedly and compulsively crossing themselves, and making other
handgestures less familiar, some indeed quite complicated, as if overlain,
since ancient days, with manual commentary.