Against the Day (185 page)

Finally
one day their luck took a turn. They were at Veliko Târnovo, where the
Professor had gone to look into a variant of the
ruchenitsa
wedding
dance, rumored to exhibit syncopations hitherto unrecorded on the underlying
7/8. It was midFebruary, St. Tryphon’s Day, coinciding with a ritual

pruning of vines. Everybody was
drinking homemade Dimyat and Misket out of casks and dancing to a small local
band made up of tuba, accordion, violin, and clarinet.

Reef, who never missed a chance to
kick up his heels, was out there with a variety of appealing partners, who
seemed actually to have formed a queue. Yashmeen, somewhere past the middle of
her term, was content to sit under an awning and watch the goingson. Cyprian
was looking and not looking at young townsfolk he’d once have termed desirable,
when all at once he was approached by a thin, sunburned individual all togged
out for the wedding.

   
“I
know you,” said Cyprian.

   
“Salonica.
Year before last. You saved my life.”

“Why, it’s ‘Gabrovo Slim.’ But as I
recall, about all I did was try to find you a fez that would fit properly.”

   
“Thought
you’d be dead by now.”

   
“Doing
my best. Was that you that just got married?”

“My wife’s little sister. With luck she’ll
be able to work through harvest before they have their first.” His eyes had
kept sliding away to look at Yashmeen. “She is your wife?”

   
“Not
that lucky.” He introduced them.

   
Slim
beamed in the direction of Yash’s belly. “When is baby?”

   
“May,
I think.”

“Come be with us when baby comes.
Better for you, for baby, for father especially.”

   
“Here’s
the very bloke,” said Cyprian with every appearance of gaiety.

Reef
got congratulated and reinvited to stay with Slim and his family, who as it
turned out had a small rose farm near Kazanlâk, in the heart of the Rozovata
Dolina, or Valley of the Roses. Cyprian, who had been inhabiting a
onetoonescale map of the Peninsula since arriving, immediately grew alert. The
Valley ran eastwest, between the Balkan range and the Sredna Gora, and
certainly was as likely a place as any to be looking for the
Interdikt.

He
waited till he and Slim had a moment to chat before bringing the topic up.
“Have you noticed anything peculiar going on out there?”

With
perhaps some general idea already of Cyprian’s profession, “Interesting you
should ask. People have been seen who should not be there. Germans, we think.”
He paused before looking directly at Cyprian. “Bringing machinery.”

   
“Not
farm machinery.”

   
“Some
of it looks electrical. Military also. Dynamos, long black cables they

bury in ground. Nobody wants to dig them up to see what they
are, though

there were rumors that some local
mutri
thought they’d
go steal what they

could, and bring it down to Petrich, on Macedonian border,
where you can sell nearly anything. Someplace between Plovdiv and Petrich, they
disappeared, along with whatever they got. Never seen since. In Bulgarian crime
world, these things ordinarily are looked into, and appropriate action taken,
but by next day everything was dropped. First time anyone has seen those people
afraid of anything.”

“How difficult would it be, do you
think, to have a look round, without anyone knowing?”

   
“I
can show you.”

   
“You’re
not afraid?”

   
“You
will see if it is something to be afraid of.”

Despite having
known
that it would
happen at some point in the journey, when they announced that the time had come
for them to take off on their own, Professor Sleepcoat was devastated. “I
should have known better than to come out this time,” he groaned. “It’s like
musical chairs. Except that the music stopped two years ago.”

   
“We’ll
keep our ears tuned for Lydian material,” Yashmeen promised.

“Maybe there is none anymore. Maybe
it’s gone forever. Maybe that gap in the musical continuum, that silence, is a
first announcement of something terrible, of which this structural silence is
only an inoffensive metaphor.”

   
“You’ll
let them know back at YzlesBain that we—?”

   
“Part
of my remit. I shall miss you, however.”

Even to the
indigenous
, used to twittering
fools from the north and west in tourist attire, the three seemed gravely
passionate, as if behaving not as they wished but as they must, in answer to
unheard voices of duty. Who could know, finding them in any of these hill
towns, climbing, descending, never a step in front of another you’d call level,
thinking only when they must about the next meal, their faces shadowed by
hatbrims of woven straw, taken from the flanks or beneath by sunlight off the
ancient pavingstones or sunbattered earth too often into areas of angelic
implication—what were they doing out here this late in history? when
everyone else had long turned, withdrawn, reentered the harsh certainties of
homelands farther west, were preparing or prepared
. . . .

Slim’s farm, from what Reef could
tell after a quick appraisal that by now was second nature to him, enjoyed a
good strategic position, in a little valley of its own, the creek running down
out of the Sredna Gora bordered by

other small farms, each with its
murderous dog, alongside it a road that unfolded in slow curves, now and then a
shade tree, geese up and down the roadside or running from ambush hissing and
honking, traffic along the road easily seen for miles, most of it farm carts
and horsemen uniformed and irregular, all carrying at least one rifle, all
known locally, and called out to, by their diminutives.

The farmhouse was teeming with
children, though when Cyprian actually counted, there were never more than two.
Their mother, Zhivka, turned out to have a way with roses, and kept a private
patch out in back of the house where she carried on hybrid experiments, having
begun years ago by crossing
R. damascena
with
R. alba
and gone on
from there. She had names for each one, she talked to them, and after a while,
when the moon and the wind were right, Cyprian heard them talking back. “In
Bulgarian, of course, so I didn’t catch it all.”

“Anything you’d like to share?”
muttered Yash, big as a barge and having an uncomfortable day.

   
“They
were discussing you and the baby, actually. Apparently it will be a girl.”

   
“Yes
here’s a nice heavy flowerpot, just a moment now, stand quite still
. . . .
”

As her time approached, the women in
the neighborhood drew closer around Yashmeen, Reef went out to raise whatever
hell was available in these parts, and Cyprian was left to churches, fields of
rosebushes six or seven feet high, extended sunsets, steelblue night. Men
avoided him. Cyprian wondered if, in a trance he could no longer remember, he
had not offended someone here, perhaps mortally. It was not—in this he
was certain, perhaps it was the only thing he could be certain of—the
severity in the faces turned to him was not that of desire. This was one
delusion he was not allowed the comfort of in what it sometimes seemed might be
his ultimate hours, and did it matter two pins, really? He wasn’t looking for
erotic company any longer. Something else, perhaps, but fucking strangers was
scarcely by now of much concern.

The baby was born
during the rose harvest, in the
early morning with the women already back from the fields, born into a
fragrance untampered with by the heat of the sun. From the very first moment
her eyes were enormously given to all the world around her. What Cyprian had
imagined as terrifying, at best disgusting, proved instead to be irresistible,
he and Reef to either side of the ancient bed, each holding one of Yashmeen’s
hands as she rose to meet the waves of pain, despite the muttering women who
plainly wanted the two men elsewhere. Hell, preferably.

   
The
afterbirth went into the ground beneath a young rosebush. Yashmeen

named the baby Ljubica. Later in the day, she held her
daughter out to the men. “Here. Take her for a while. She’ll sleep.” Reef held
the newborn carefully, as he remembered holding Jesse the first time, stood
shifting foot to foot, then began to move carefully around the little room,
ducking his head for the slant of the roof, presently handing her over to
Cyprian, who took her warily, her lightness fitting so easily after all into
his hands, nearly tugging him off the floor—but more than that, the
familiarity, as if this had already happened countless times before. He
wouldn’t dare say it out loud. But somehow, here was a brief moment of
certitude, brought back from an exterior darkness, as if to fill a space he
could not have defined before this, before she was really here, tiny sleeping
Ljubica.

His
nipples were all at once peculiarly sensitive, and he found himself almost
desperate with an unexpected flow of feeling, a desire for her to feed at his breast.
He breathed in deeply. “I have this—” he whispered, “this . . .” It was
certain. “I knew her once—previously—perhaps in that other life it
was she who took care of me—and now here is the balance being
restored—”

   
“Oh,
you’re overthinking it all,” Yashmeen said, “as usual.”

For much of that
summer
, Reef and Cyprian
were out in search of the elusive “Austrian minefield.” They made their way
among tobacco patches and fields of sunflowers, wild lilacs in bloom, geese
honking up and down the village streets. Shaggy dogs came running out of sheep
pasture barking homicidally. Sometimes Yashmeen came along but more and more
she stayed at the farm, helping with chores, being with Ljubica.

When the roses were in and Gabrovo
Slim found himself with some time, true to his word he took Reef and Cyprian
out to a promontory, windscoured and overlooking a treeless plain. Beside a
small outbuilding rose a hundredfoot tower supporting a toroidal black iron
antenna. “That wasn’t here before,” Slim said.

“I think it’s one of those Tesla
rigs,” Reef said. “My brother used to work on them.”

Inside the transmission shack were
one or two operators with their ears all but attached to speakerhorns,
listening attentively to what seemed mostly at first to be atmospheric static.
The longer the visitors listened, though, the more possible it became that now
and then they were hearing spoken words, in a number of languages including
English. Cyprian shook his head, smiling if not in disbelief at least in a
polite attempt not to offend.

   
“It’s
all right,” said one of the operators. “Many in the field believe that

these are voices of the dead. Edison and Marconi both feel
that the syntonic wireless can be developed as a way to communicate with
departed spirits.”

Reef immediately thought of Webb, and
the séance back there in Switzerland, and his jocular remarks to Kit about
telephoning the dead.

From outside now came a massed
mechanical uproar. “Motorcycles,” Cyprian said, “judging by the throb. I’ll
just go have a look, shall I.”

Six or seven cyclists in leather
fatigues that time and terrain had only made more stylish, riding strippeddown
fourcylinder touring bikes—he identified them immediately as Derrick
Theign’s elite “shadowing” unit, R.U.S.H., whom he hadn’t seen since the Trieste
station.

“Is that you, Latewood?” Behind a
pair of smoked goggles Cyprian recognized Mihály Vámos, a former hillclimbing
champion on the Hungarian circuit. They had put in some time together in
Venice—enough, one hoped—drinking late at night, helping each other
out of the odd canal, standing around on small bridges in the moonlight
smoking, trying to figure out what to do about Theign.

“
Szia,
haver,
”
Cyprian
nodded. “Handsome machines you’re riding these days.”

Vámos
grinned. “Not like those little Puchs they had us on at first. Some Habsburg
jobber friend of Theign’s, attractive terms, all they did was keep breaking
down. These new ones are FNs, experimental models—light, rugged, fast.
Much better.”

   
“The
Belgian arms factory?”

“Oh, these are weapons, all right.”
He had a look at Cyprian. “Happy to see you’re still out getting in trouble. We
certainly owe you our thanks.”

   
“For
. . .
?”

Vámos laughed. “We didn’t hear in
bloody detail about Theign. Messages from the Venice station stopped arriving
one day, and since then we’ve operated independently. But it appears you did us
all a service.”