Against the Day (188 page)

The hegumen seemed to recognize her
from a previous metempsychosis. “The mooned planet,” said the hegumen, “the
planetary electron. If selfsimilarity proves to be a builtin property of the
universe, then perhaps sleep is, after all, a form of death—repeated at a
daily frequency instead of a generational one. And we go back and forth, as
Pythagoreans suspected, in and out of death as we do dreams, but much more
slowly
. . . .
”

With no resources
to express his feelings to Cyprian,
Reef settled for practical planning. “Figure on heading west, through the
mountains, to the Adriatic coast. Any hot springs, hotel de luxes up that way
you could recommend?”

“It depends how far north you’re
planning to go. I never got south of Montenegro. Oh, but you might want this.”

It was the WebleyFosbery .38 that had
seen him through Bosnia and the years since.

Reef pretended to look it over. “Nice
little iron. Sure you wouldn’t like to hang on to this?”

   
“What
for? Brides of Night don’t carry service revolvers in their kit.”

   
“I
could think of one or two developments
. . .
.
”

“But,
Reef.” A hand on his shoulder. “That’s what you mustn’t do.” The two men looked
in each other’s eyes, for longer than either could remember doing.

Cyprian came with
them
as far as the
river. Above them cloud had begun to enfold the convent and the church, as if
denying them second thoughts. The morning seemed to be darkening toward some
Balkan equivalent of Transfiguration.

   
She
handed Ljubica to Cyprian, and he held her ceremonially, and kissed

her loudly on her stomach as always, and as always she
squealed. “Don’t remember me,” he advised her. “I’ll see to all the
remembering.” Back in Yash’s arms, she beamed at him calmly, and he knew he had
only minutes before regret would force him into a mistake of some kind. “Go
safely. Try to stay out of Albania.”

As if seized by something ancient,
Yashmeen cried, “Please—don’t look back.”

   
“I
wasn’t planning to.”

   
“I’m
serious. You mustn’t. I beg you, Cyprian.”

   
“Or
he’ll take you below, you mean. Down to America.”

   
“Always
makin with em jokes,” Reef in a hollow chuckle.

   
And
none of them looked back, not even Ljubica.

   
And
Cyprian was taken behind a great echoless door.

For days
Reef and Yashmeen each latched into
a separate sorrow, couldn’t even talk about it. Reef gave up his restless
scouting of likely honkytonks, and when evening came and the gray light fell
like fine ash, he only sat heartbroken, indoors preferably, by a window,
holding the baby sometimes. Being in her own partial vacuum, Yashmeen knew of
no way to chirp him out of it.

   
“I
didn’t see it coming,” Reef said finally, “but I guess you did.”

   
“It
wasn’t us,” she said. “Nothing we did. Nothing we should have done.”

   
“Don’t
say ‘he must’ve loved God more’n us,’ is all.”

   
“No
because I don’t think that’s true.” She was all ready to start crying then.

“I
mean God don’t normally run up and bite people on the ass, but if he
did
,
see—”

   
“Reef.
Cyprian loved us. He still does.”

 
Somehow neither saw much further point in going to the Black
Sea coast. They turned and headed west. One evening Reef came in to find
Yashmeen sitting distraught by a pile of Cyprian’s discarded clothing, picking
up item after item. “I could pretend to be him for you,” she cried, not loud
enough to wake Ljubica, the hopefulness in her voice more than he knew how to
respond to, “I could wear his shirts, his trousers, you could tear them off,
and take my arse and fuck my mouth, and imagine that he’s . . .”

“Darlin
. . .
please
. . . .
That ain’t goin to do it
.
. . .
” Too damn close to tears himself if you really wanted to know.

He
had begun to hold her with a tenderness she had seen before this only when he
held Ljubica. I am not his child, she protested, but to herself, even as she
settled further into his embrace.

·
    
·
    
·

They made their
way
up off the Plain of
Thrace, into the Rhodopes and then the Pirin range, over toward Macedonia. Some
days the light was pitiless. Light so saturated with color, brought hovering to
such tension, that it could not be borne for long, as if it were dangerous to
be out in country filled with light like this, as if anyone beneath it were
just about to be taken by it, if not over into death then some transformation
at least as severe. Light like this must be received with judgment—too much,
too constantly, would exhaust the soul. To move through it would be to struggle
against time, the flow of the day, the arbitrarily assigned moment of darkness.
Sometimes Reef wondered if maybe somebody hadn’t triggered that
Interdikt
after
all, and this was the residue from it
. . . .

In midOctober, after declaring war
against Turkey, divisions of the Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian armies invaded
Macedonia, and by the twentysecond, fighting between Serbians and Turks was
heavy around Kumanovo, in the north. Meanwhile Bulgarian forces were pressing
south toward the Turkish border and Adrianople just beyond.

Each day then would show Reef, Yash,
and Ljubica only a further narrowing of choices, as they were pressed by the
movements of forces toward the west and south. Rumors were everywhere, a storm
of fearful hearsay from gatherings at streetcorners and wellheads
. . . .
“It’s what we were sent out here to
stop,” Yashmeen said. “This must mean that we failed, and the assignment is
over.”

“The job now’s just to get out of
here,” Reef figured. He began to spend time each morning at whatever
mehana,
crossroads, or other gathering place might be handy, trying to pick up what
news he could and figure the safest direction to be heading in. “Is they’re
comin in from all directions, is the problem here, Serbs from the north, Greeks
from the south, Bulgarians from the east. Turks on the run everyplace,
shouldn’t last long, but what a commotion.”

   
“So
we keep heading west.”

“Only choice. Try and scoot between
the armies. Then, if we get that far, worry about that Albania.”

The fighting
had been moving obliquely away from
them, from Philippopolis, toward the Turkish border and Adrianople. They crept
south, in the partial vacuum, behind Ivanoff’s Second Army, which was on the
right of the

general advance.

   
They
crossed over into Macedonia. Even the crows were silent now. Heading west
through Strumica and Valandovo, they found the pomegranate orchards full of
refugees, and they kept on into the valley of the Vardar beyond, and the
Tikveš wine country, where the harvest had just been brought in.

According to
rumor
the Serbians had
defeated the Turks at Kumanovo, but had been slow in following up their
advantage. The countryside was filled with Turkish soldiers either cut off from
their units or in flight, all looking deeply unhappy, many wounded, some about
to die. Monastir was said to be a Serbian objective now, which meant there
would be fighting to the westward as well.

Reef took to scavenging weapons
wherever he could, fieldissue and hunting pieces, Mausers and Mannlichers as
well as more ancient firearms, some with Arabic inscriptions or trimmed with
elkhorn or boartusk ivory, ammunition of all calibers from 6.5 to 11 mm,
sometimes discovered in abandoned encampments, more and more often taken from
the dead, who had begun to appear in increasing numbers, like immigrants into a
country where they were feared, disliked, pitilessly exploited.

As the landscape turned increasingly
chaotic and murderous, the streams of refugees swelled. Another headlong,
fearful escape of the kind that in collective dreams, in legends, would be
misremembered and reimagined into pilgrimage or crusade
. . .
the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope ahead,
the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national, delusion.
Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too awful to face,
thriving, emerging in disguise, vigorous, evil, destructive, inextricable.

“
There’s
fighting
out ahead of us now, so best we step careful,” Reef reported.
Each day brought them closer to the horizon of the unimaginable. All Europe
could be at war by now. Nobody knew.

When Ljubica heard her first
explosions from up in the mountains to the northwest, between Veles and Prilep,
though she hadn’t been sleeping, she seemed to wake from wakefulness, her eyes
widening, and let out a laugh, “Which from an older child,” her mother trying
not to be too offended, “one must describe as
uproarious.
”

   
“Gets
it from her grandpa,” Reef nodded, “dynamite baby. In the blood.”

   
“Glad
to see you both enjoying yourselves. Could we try not to get caught in any of
this?”

   
A
major battle was shaping up, and Reef, Yash, and Ljubica happened to be heading
into its rear areas. They joined processions across the plains, between
stagnant ditches, farm carts pushed and pulled by younger sons, piled with
furniture that would end up being burned for warmth as the days grew colder and
the terrain higher, dogs in unending negotiation over what was guarded and what
fair targets, forming temporary packs to gang likely sheep, scattering at the
arrival of the flock’s own sheepdog. Krupp guns thumping in the distance,
village crones wandering the hillsides, the constant birds of prey patrolling
the sky.

After being defeated at Kumanovo,
three Turkish army corps had fled south, toward the fortified city of Monastir,
one of the last Turkish bastions in Europe, pursued by the Serbian First Army,
whose orders were to finish them off. While the Sixth Corps went directly to
Monastir, the Fifth and Seventh deployed in the mountains just to the north to
engage and try to slow the Serbian forces coming down by way of Ricevo and
Prilep. A stretch of mountain fighting followed, notably at the Babuna Pass
above Prilep.

One morning at
first light
they awoke
into a firefight the likes of which few out here had ever encountered and would
never have expected in this antiquated world of boltaction weaponry. Among the
frantic popping of Mauser against Mauser, something new on Earth. Machine guns,
the future of warfare. Russian Madsen guns and a few Montenegrin Rexers. It was
the devastation and final descent of the Ottoman project, the centuries of
Turkey in Europe, the last garrisons falling one by one
. . . .

   
“What
is it?” she whispered, holding the baby tightly to her.

“Oh just some bees, darlin,” Reef
affecting the roguish smile that apparently would never fail him. “Serbian
bumblebees, just be sure and keep your heads down.”

“Oh,” going along with it, not that
there was much choice at the moment, “that’s all.” Ljubica was trembling but
quiet, as if determined not to cry.

“You got that Webley someplace handy,
am I right?” trying not to holler too loud. Only if they get close enough, he
had said, when he gave it to her. Otherwise we’re fine. Was it going to be
close enough this time?

Troops were running by screaming,
whether in panic terror or battle cry, whether Serbian or Turk, nobody was
about to look out there and see.

Howitzer shells started dropping
nearby. Not a sustained barrage, but it would only take one.

   
“Once
they get their line and length,” she said, “we may have to vacate the

premises.”

   
“I
think,” said Reef, “you mean ‘range and bearing,’ darlin.”

“A cricketing term,” she explained.
“I once played briefly at Girton a million years ago. My secret dream was
always to play for a team of nomads like I Zingari
. . . .
”

It had become their practice to adopt
this style of chitchat during moments of danger. Whether it fooled Ljubica for
a minute was debatable, but it kept Reef and Yash occupied. Like the terrible
footfalls of an invisible angel, the blasts were coming closer. Presently the
shells were visible, rising and falling slowly and steeply out in the
monochrome autumn, each time descending with a harsh, buzzing shriek. Finally
one landed so close that all the lethal noise of that day was gathered and
concentrated into its one split second, and Ljubica changed her mind and began
to cry, disengaging from her mother’s shelter and facing out into whatever it
was, screaming, not in fear but in anger. In numb fascination her parents gazed
at her. It was a minute before they understood that the machinegun fire had
stopped. There was some more ordnance, but much farther away now.