Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “‘If she’s content with a vegetable love . . .’” trilled Lorelei with a pretty shrug.

  “It would depend upon which vegetable,” supposed Noellyn, the thoughtful one.

  “Oh, old Cyps is all right,” demurred Yashmeen.

  “For a pasty-faced sodomite with no control over his public impulses, you mean,” frowned Faun.

  “He carries a parasol,” added Lorelei.

  “And the unspeakable business with the Rugby blue in hall.”

  “But he makes me laugh.”

  “Yes they are good for that,” conceded serious Noellyn, “though one does hear, more often than one would care to, this ‘he makes me laugh’ defense. There being laughter, that is, and laughter.”

  “And if laughing’s what you fancy . . .” Lorelei held out one of the bottles of Mâconnais they had brought.

  “And yet,” said Yashmeen, “there isn’t one of us, not even you, Noellyn, with that enchanting nose always in a book, who wouldn’t go chasing after . . . I don’t know, George Grossmith, if he tipped us the merest wink.”

  “Hmm. Junior or Senior?”

  “And let’s not forget that jolly Weedon,” Lorelei pretended to sigh.

  CYPRIAN MADE Professor Renfrew’s acquaintance by way of Ratty McHugh. “Another of those envenomed lives,” Ratty had concluded, “all the desire to work international mischief, and none of the resources, and therefore, within the ancient walls of this tiny place, dangerous to an alarming degree.”

  Renfrew in his all-seeing way understood immediately how it was with Cyprian and Yashmeen, and duly filed a summary in the running accumulation of dossiers he kept on everyone who had ever crossed his path, including waiters, window-cleaners, cricket umpires, up through F.O. eminences and even heads of state—though these mostly were represented by distracted handshakes on reception lines, nevertheless to be entered as “Reluctant to look directly at anyone in formal situations,” or “Small hands, some evidence of early trauma, cp. Wilhelm II file.” The data by now filled several rooms he was obliged to rent for the purpose, as well as odd cabinets, closets, and steamer trunks, and in private he called it his “Map of the World.” Its blank spaces produced in him that refined horror any sensitive geographer might be forgiven, as well as hopes that enough intrepid young explorers would go out at his bidding and gather enough information to reduce the staring white patch of the Unrecorded to something he could tolerate.

  Ratty, for some reason, was one of Renfrew’s current favorites, and they even went now and then together to Newmarket during the racing season.

  “And I thought I was obsessed,” Cyprian would tease when Ratty was discovered, contrary to his louche reputation, burrowed in some weighty volume of government reports or, with the help of the eight volumes of Morse and Vassilev’s Bulgarian-English Dictionary, attempting to master the intricacies of East Rumelian land-tenure since the Treaty of Berlin, particularly the impact of communal farming on the ancient zadruga tradition.

  “Only because it’s been part of a pattern,” Ratty would begin to explain himself, “ever since the old Turkish tchifliks were broken up you know, and especially in view of the newly-emerging trend towards mobility in this system of gradinarski druzhini—” until noting the look on Cyprian’s face, “nor do I find much problem in throwing this volume at you, Latewood, as, given your gossamer nature, it should cause no damage to either missile or target.”

  Palms up, all innocence, “I only wish sometimes my professors were that demanding, it would keep me out of no end of trouble.”

  “We are not all of us Renfrew’s creatures, you know.”

  “Why does he look at Yashmeen like that?”

  “Like what? Ordinary sexual interest, I expect, not everyone in this institution has to be a sod, excuse me, your feelings, I meant pouffe of course.”

  “No, no, it’s something else.”

  Indeed it was. Ratty already knew in a general way about Renfrew’s “Map of the World,” but saw no point in sharing this with Latewood, who at this stage of things was hopelessly immune to the appeal of information and its uses. Ratty was keeping no running accounts on her himself, being more of an English Rose person, he supposed, but from what claptrap, street-sweepings, and failed canards came his way, Miss Halfcourt had connections to the eastward, a phrase Renfrew was habituated to and a guarantee that he would feel some hopeful curiosity.

  THE TERMS WENT GLIDING, Lent and Easter, into the Long Vacation. Yashmeen returned to her tiny garret room at Chunxton Crescent and immediately noticed, if not exactly a divergence between the T.W.I.T. and herself, at least a growing impatience with what their “protection” by now had come to mean—an unrelenting surveillance, not limited to the Colonial Office and the Queen Anne’s Gate brigade but including the less-visible attentions of the Okhrana, Ballhausplatz, and Wilhelmstraße, requiring periodic visits to Whitehall to enact the same weary and fruitless exercises before underlings often enough bedazzled but unable, sometimes, even to locate the proper dossier. Lew Basnight was about, but the doings of the Icosadyad made him unpredictable as a social companion, leaving little but lengthy, idiot-infested summer soirées. Against these, like a shoot in a garden, from some invisible bulb or seed far below, green, astonishing, emerged this all-but-erotic fascination with the thoughts of former Göttingen eminence G. F. B. Riemann. She secluded herself in the upper room with a number of mathematics texts and began, like so many of that era, a journey into the dodgy terrain of Riemann’s Zeta function and his famous conjecture—almost casually thrown into an 1859 paper on the number of primes less than a given size—that all its nontrivial zeroes had a real part equal to one half.

  Neville and Nigel spent the summer developing their own hypothesis that members of the Chinese race without exception could be depended upon for access to opium products. “Just wait for a Chinaman to show up,” as Nigel explained, “and sooner or later he’ll lead you to a ‘joint,’ and Bob’s your uncle.” They found themselves in Limehouse so often that eventually they took rooms there.

  Cyprian was received warily back into the Knightsbridge domicile, if not the embrace, of his family. He had been introduced when a youth to sodomitical activities by an uncle with whom he journeyed to Paris to sell wallpaper, and to celebrate landing a major account one day with the Hôtel Alsace, over on the Left Bank between rue Jacob and the river, Uncle Gris-wold had brought the boy to an all-male house of ill-fame. “Like a duck to water,” reported Griswold to Cyprian’s father, whose disappointment was directed not at his brother but at Cyprian. “It was a test of character,” he informed his son. “You failed. Perhaps Cambridge is the place for you after all.”

  Though Cyprian had a vague idea of Yashmeen’s address, he did not call that summer. After a short while, to everyone’s mutual relief, he took the boat-train for the Continent, ending up in Berlin for several weeks remarkable for their excess.

  IN THE BRISKNESS of autumn again, everyone reconnected. New colors of clothing had become fashionable, notably Coronation Red. Privileged misses appeared with their hair cut in fringes like factory girls. The cricket talk was all of Ranji and C. B. Fry, and of course the Australian season lately under way. Engineering students met in New Court at high noon for mock duels to see who could draw and calculate fastest on the Tavernier-Gravet slide rules it was á la mode that season to pack around in leather scabbards that fastened to one’s belt. New Court in those days was still a resort of the unruly, and interest in calculation soon deferred to drinking beer, as much of it and as quickly as possible.

  Cyprian, while rejecting his family’s High Church faith, strangely had begun—especially when the Mags and Nuncs and Matins responsories could be heard from services at Trinity or King’s—to glimpse that, precisely because of its impossibilities, the disarray of self-important careerists and hierarchy-obsessed functionaries, the yawning and fidgeting town-lad choristers and narcotic sermonizing—it was possible to hope, not so much despite as paradoxically because
of this very snarled web of human flaw, for the emergence of the incommensurable mystery, the dense, unknowable Christ, bearing the secret of how once on a hilltop that was not Zion, he had conquered death. Cyprian stood in the evenings, at the Compline hour, just outside the light cast from the chapel windows, and wondered what was happening to his skepticism, which was seldom being addressed these days except by such truly horrible specimens as the Te Deum in Commemoration of the Khaki Election by Filtham, which—although in the hymn-writing trade botching a Te Deum is thought to be next to impossible, the psalmodic formulæ being well established, even unto what notes to end on—nonetheless, from its stultifying length, in arguable violation of any number of child-labor statutes, as well as a relentless chromaticism that might have made even Richard Strauss uneasy, too “modern” to have retained any power to penetrate and sacredly stun, it was already known among schoolchild choristers from Stain-drop to St. Paul’s as “Filtham’s Tedium.”

  Meanwhile Yashmeen was finding Girton increasingly tiresome, the epidemic idiocy, the impossible dress regulations, not to mention the food, unimproved by the saturated blonde light that descended into Hall through the high arch of overhead panes, bathing the nested tables and the linen and chattering girls. She took refuge more and more in the Zeta-function problem, to which she found herself adverting even as the classmate whose gaze during the day she had met and held came tiptoeing in after curfew, slipping naked into Yashmeen’s own narrow bed, even in that rare and wordless moment, she was not quite able to ignore the question, almost as if he were whispering to her, of why Riemann had simply asserted the figure of one-half at the outset instead of deriving it later. . . . “One would of course like to have a rigorous proof of this,” he wrote, “but I have put aside the search . . . after some fleeting vain attempts because it is not necessary for the immediate objective of my investigation.”

  But didn’t that then imply . . . the tantalizing possibility was just out of reach . . .

  . . . and suppose that at Göttingen, somewhere among his papers, in some as-yet-uncatalogued memorandum to himself, he had actually been unable not to go back to it, haunted as anyone since, back to the maddeningly simple series he had found in Gauss and expanded to take account of the whole “imaginary” mirror-world which even Ramanujan here at Trinity had ignored until Hardy pointed it out to him—revisited, in some way relighted the scene, making it possible to prove the conjecture as rigorously as anyone might wish . . .

  “I say Pinks, you are here aren’t you?”

  “And where are you, saucy one, not down where you ought to be it seems, we must sort that out, mustn’t we . . .” Taking the girl by her blonde hair, rather rudely, and in a single elegant movement lifting her own nightdress and straddling the impertinent little face. . . .

  “SO IT’S OFF to the land of lederhosen, is it,” said Cyprian with as little peevishness as possible. Whatever was allowed between them by now did not include the display of hurt feelings.

  “Shabby of me obviously, but I didn’t really know myself until—”

  “Good Lord, you’re not apologizing. Are you quite well?”

  “Cyprian, it’s nothing I expected. We are sent here, most of us, aren’t we really, to stay out of the way, not be a bother—the books, the tutoring, the learning, it’s all incidental. For something to actually . . . light up, it’s . . . no one would believe me, if I . . . oh, one or two boys in Hardy’s classes, but certainly no one back at Chunxton Crescent. Hardy knows about zeroes of the ζ-function in a general way but isn’t quite insane enough about it, whereas Hilbert thinks of nothing else, and he’s at Göttingen, it’s that obsessiveness I need, so Göttingen it is.”

  “Something . . . mathematical,” he blinked. She began to glare but then saw what he was about. “I knew I’d regret it someday. Never able to do more than work out the cricket averages, you know. . . .”

  “You think I’m a lunatic.”

  “Why should it matter to you anymore what . . . what I think?” Oh Cyprian, he immediately slapped himself mentally, no please, not now.

  She was patient today. “What you think of me, Cyprian? It has been my stage-lighting—threatening sometimes to burn me away—illuminating me into some beau-idéal. . . . Who would not wish to become, even for a moment, that brighter creature . . . even if her fate be ashes?” She put her hand on his, and he felt just below his ears and down his neck a rapid fine shiver he could not control.

  “Of course.” He found a cigarette and lit up, belatedly offering her one, which she took and said she’d keep for later. “There’s little future for you in simply hanging about here being adored. I know nothing about Riemann, but I do at least understand obsessiveness. Don’t I.” And for all that he still would not take his eyes from the long, compelling curve of her bared neck. She could not deny him this, it was unmistakably desire—though of rather a specialized sort, he shouldn’t wonder.

  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN too much to expect Professor Renfrew to stay clear of his propensity to meddle—the minute he learned of Yashmeen’s impending departure for Göttingen, he began a campaign of inducement if not outright seduction—there were times she could not be sure.

  “Not an assassination scheme,” the Grand Cohen assured her on one of her many weekend recursions down the Great Eastern to Chunxton Crescent to consult. “That could mean his own destruction as well. More likely he wishes you to work some severe mischief upon the mental well-being of his opposite number, Werfner. This is a professorial fantasy dating back at least to the days of Weierstrass and Sofia Kovalevskaia, when it entered the folklore of academic endeavor. The years have not redeemed its root premise, which remains despicable as ever.”

  She frowned.

  “Well you are presentable, there’s no avoiding that. When you transmigrate into your next body, you might consider something a bit less eyecatching. Some member of the plant kingdom is often a safe bet.”

  “You want me to try and be reborn as a vegetable?”

  “Nothing in Pythagorean doctrine that forbids it.”

  “You are a great comfort, Grand Cohen.”

  “I suppose I only mean, be cautious. Though desperately carnal themselves, those two, yet their allegiance is not to the given world.”

  “Of the flesh but not the world? How peculiar. How can that be? It sounds like maths, only more practical somehow.”

  “This came for you, by the way.” He handed her a package which appeared to have undergone some wrathful treatment by the post office. She unknotted a length of string and tore away already tattered wrapping paper to reveal an inexpensively bound folio volume with a four-color chromolithograph on its cover of a young woman in the sort of provocative pose observed on postcards from the seaside, her finger held to her plump and shining lips.

  “‘Snazzbury’s Silent Frock,’” Yashmeen read aloud. “‘Operating on the principle of wave interference, sound cancelling sound, the act of walking being basically a periodic phenomenon, and the characteristic “rustling” of an ordinary frock an easily computed complication of the underlying ambulational frequency. . . . It was discovered only recently in the scientific laboratory of Dr. Snazzbury of Oxford University, that each individual toilette might be tuned to itself through certain structural adjustments in the tailoring—’”

  “It materialized in the dining-hall,” shrugged the Cohen, “or it was crudely made to appear as if it had. Renfrew’s doing. Rancid mockery written all over it.”

  “There’s a note. ‘Every girl must have one. You never know when there’ll be need. Your appointment has been arranged. Bring your charming friends.’ An address and a date and time.” She passed him the slip of paper.

  “It could be dangerous.”

  But Yashmeen was interested in the general problem. “We assume the noiseless feature would only make sense indoors, but is it for stealth, meditation, means to an end, end in itself—under what circs should a woman wish to avoid the rustling of a dress? Why not simply wear trou
sers and a shirt?”

  “When she must also appear plausibly feminine in public,” supposed the Grand Cohen, “whilst engaged, in private, upon some clandestine assignment.”

  “Espionage.”

  “He must know you’ll tell us everything.”

  “Will I?”

  “Miss Halfcourt, are you attempting to flirt with me? Desist. Grand Cohens are flirt-proof. Part of the Oath. I admit I’m curious, as no doubt are you. My advice is to go in for a fitting and have a look round, if possible. Share what you wish.”

  IT WAS A BIT MORE SINISTER than that, actually. Those whose job it was to keep track of any recent invention with any weapons potential, however remote, and to find connections, if any, to military and political events in Europe, observed the traffic in Silent Frocks, which had picked up in recent days, with due alarm, drawing up lengthy reports, bringing in everything from Balkan troop movements to the price of diamonds in Belgium.

  “Yes very nice indeed, we’ll take a hundred of ‘em.”

  Pause. “That would require a sum in advance. You gentlemen are . . . that is . . .” His gaze arrested by the enormous sheaf of banknotes the emissary had produced from a dark leather case embossed with an appropriate Seal.

  “Will this be all right?”

  And when the personages had quite left the premises,

  “A hundred women on the move, all silent? For how long? Allow me to register a certain skepticism. Green, white, and mauve stripes, I expect.”

  “No, these aren’t suffragettes. They want black crepon and a lining of Italian-cloth. We’ve no idea, we’re only the agents in this.”

  Nonetheless, their voices did shake just perceptibly with gynecophobia, or the fear of women, of silent women, in these absolutely silent black gowns, advancing along corridors which seemed to recede behind them without limit, perhaps also fear of these unechoing corridors themselves, especially under certain conditions of low light . . . with no least fragment of music in the distance, without the comforts of commentary, their hands unoccupied with parasols or fans, lamps or weaponry . . . should one wait, withdraw, turn in panic and run? What clandestine purpose? More unsettling, how much official support?