Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Reef felt a personal interest. “Well how do folks eat?”

  “The women and children are allowed to come and go.”

  “Was it you who . . .?”

  “Not me, I was a baby at the time. It was my grandfather, he shot a guest of the other family, who was staying with them one night—something to do with the League of Prizren and the fighting that was going on back then. Later on, nobody said they could remember much, not even the man’s name after a while. But in the Kanuni, the rules are the same for guests as for family.”

  By the time Ramiz hit adolescence and became a legitimate target himself, being cooped up did not hold the same appeal it might have for a more mature individual. One night, “Maybe I went crazy, I can’t remember,” he slipped out a window, up a gulch, across the hills, and down to the sea, where he found a boat. “Turks. They knew what was going on all right, but they lived by a different code.”

  “So . . . your grandfather, your father? Still at home?”

  He shrugged. “I hope so. I’ll never see them again. Jetokam, jetokam! Strange how I am alive! Is this how revenge is taken in America?”

  Reef told a version of his own story. In it, Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno became more like critters of pure evil than guns for hire, and of course there were no rules about sanctuary on your own property—in fact, it had taken him this long to catch on, nothing like Ramiz’s Kanuni at all, though everybody liked to talk about the Code of the West as if it really existed and you could borrow a copy from the local library when you needed to check on details.

  “Avenging your family is still allowed I guess, though lately as civilization comes creepin out from back east, authorities tend to frown more and more on it. They tell you, ‘Don’t take the law into your own hands.’”

  “In whose hands, then?”

  “Marshal . . . sheriff.”

  “The police? But that . . . is to remain a child.”

  Reef, who’d been feeling calm enough till then, found that his voice had dried up. He sat there with a hand-rolled cigarette stuck smoldering to his lip, and couldn’t meet the other man’s eyes.

  “Më fal. I meant no—”

  “It’s O.K. That isn’t why I left.”

  “You killed them.”

  Reef gave it some thought. “They had powerful friends.”

  Among the many superstitions inside this mountain was a belief that the tunnel was “neutral ground,” exempt not only from political jurisdictions but from Time itself. The Anarchists and Socialists on the shift had their own mixed feelings about history. They suffered from it, and it was also to be their liberator, if they could somehow survive to see the day. In the shower-baths at the end of the shift, the suffering could be read on each body, as a document written in insults to flesh and bone—scars, crookedness, missing parts. They knew each other as more comfortable men, in the steam-rooms of hydropathics, for instance, would not. Amateur bullet removals and bone settings, cauterizations and brandings, some souvenirs were public and could be compared, others were private and less likely to be talked about.

  One day Reef happened to notice on Fulvio what looked like a railroad map executed in scar tissue. “What was that from, you walk in between a couple of bobcats fucking?”

  “An encounter with a Tatzelwurm,” said Fulvio. “Dramatic, non è vero?”

  “New one on me,” said Reef.

  “It’s a snake with paws,” said Gerhardt.

  “Four legs and three toes on each paw, and a big mouth full of very sharp teeth.”

  “Hibernates here, inside the mountain.”

  “Tries to. But anybody who wakes it up, God help them.”

  Men had been known to quit work here, claiming that the Tatzelwurms were becoming enraged by all the drilling and explosions.

  Reef figured it for some kind of routine they put the newcomers through, this being the first tunnel job he’d run into it on. Sort of Alpine tommy-knockers, he figured, till he began to notice long, flowing shapes in unexpected places.

  Tunnelers brought pistols in to work and took shots whenever they thought they saw a Tatzelwurm. Some lit dynamite sticks and threw them. The creatures only became bolder, or maybe more indifferent to their fate.

  “Ain’t exactly mine rats there.”

  “In Europe,” speculated Philippe, “the mountains are much older than in America. Whatever lives in them has had more time to evolve toward a more lethal, perhaps less amiable, sort of creature.”

  “It is also a good argument for Hell,” added Gerhardt, “for some primordial plasm of hate and punishment at the center of the Earth which takes on different forms, the closer it can be projected to the surface. Here under the Alps, it happens to become visible as the Tatzelwurm.”

  “It is comforting to imagine this as an outward and visible manifestation of something else,” chuckled one of the Austrians, puffing on a cigar stub. “But sometimes a Tatzelwurm is only a Tatzelwurm.”

  “The really disturbing thing,” Fulvio with a shiver, “is when you see one and it looks up and sees that you are watching it. Sometimes it will run, but if it doesn’t, then prepare to be attacked. It helps if you don’t look at its face too long. Even in the dark, you will know where it is, because it will be screaming—a high whistling scream that like the winter cold will creep in to occupy your bones.”

  “Once you have had the encounter,” Gerhardt agreed, “it is with you forever. This is why I believe they are sent to us, to some of us in particular, for a purpose.”

  “What’s that?” Reef said.

  “To tell us that we shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “Tunneling?”

  “Putting railroads.”

  “But we’re not,” Reef pointed out. “The people who are paying us are. Do they ever see the Tatzelwurm?”

  “It visits them in their dreams.”

  “And it looks like us,” added Flaco.

  REEF SHOULD HAVE KNOWN what was coming when the favogn blew in. All of a sudden, case-hardened veterans of hot-water inundations, explosions, and gallery collapses became languorous and feeble under the assault of this warm, dry and unrelenting wind, barely able to lift a tin cup, let alone a drill. The favogn was supposed to come from the Sahara Desert, like the scirocco, though there were endless debates over this. The wind was alive. Talk of dynamic compression and adiabatic gradients didn’t carry as much weight as the certainty of its conscious intent.

  For years now, the tunnel-in-progress here had been a regular stop for leisured balneomaniacs of the era, traveling spa to spa, all over Europe and beyond, habitués of mineral waters, seekers after compounds of elements not even discovered yet, some of them rumored to provide therapeutic rays not yet assigned letters of any alphabet, though known and discussed among spa cognoscenti from Baden-Baden to Wagga Wagga.

  One day a party of these visitors showed up, about half a dozen of them, having groped their way through Moazagotl clouds and so forth. All more or less lethargic from the wind. Except—“Oh, come look at these funny little men with their big mustaches, running about in their underwear setting off dynamite, it’s simply too amusing!”

  Reef was dismayed to recognize the voice of Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin. Judas Priest and how far and fast did he have to run before he was looking up his own ass again and reliving the same mistakes, no doubt deed for deed? Edging closer, a familiar old feeling vibrating from penis to brain, he carefully had a look.

  Oh, boy. Desirable as ever, maybe more so, and as for income level, well that ice twinkling in the subterranean dusk looked real enough, and he’d bet her turnout there was straight from Paris, too. A couple of the other drillers stood gaping, unable to shut their mouths, stroking themselves without shame. This gallantry had been claiming her attention for a while, when she happened to look over at last and recognize Reef.

  “Wot, you again. Why haven’t you yours out as well, or have I grown so unattractive?”

  “Must’ve forgot what to do with it,” Reef
beamed, “waitin for you to remind me.”

  “I’m not sure after New Orleans that I should even be speaking with you.”

  A young Italian gentleman of university age, wearing what appeared to be a hunting suit modified for mountain activities, crept forward. “Macchè, gioia mia—is some difficulty with this troglodita?”

  “Càlmati, Rodolfo.” Ruperta adjusted her grip on the modish ebony alpenstock she was carrying, just impatiently enough for her companion to notice and be warned. “Tutto va bene. Un amico di pochi anni fa.” The youth, directing a short and vicious glare at Reef, stepped back and pretended to resume an interest in hydraulic drilling.

  “Good to see you maintainin ’em standards,” Reef nodded. “Wouldn’t do to get déclassé or nothin.”

  “We’re in Domodossola for a night or two. The Hôtel de la Ville et Poste, I’m sure you know it.”

  She had been amusing herself by waiting for Rodolfo to fall asleep and then getting decked out in scarlet lustra-cellulose, draping on some Ambroid jewelry, and joining the girls who loitered by the end of the tunnel, often finding herself late at night on hands and knees up on Calvary Hill being penetrated by a small queue of tunnel hands, often two at a time, who cursed her in unknown tongues—as she seemed eager to let Reef know about the first chance she got. “Large, work-roughened hands,” she murmured, “bruising me, scratching me, and I do try to keep my skin ever so soft and smooth, here, feel here . . . remember . . .” Reef, who always knew what she was up to—Ruperta after all was not very complicated when it came to fucking, one of her major advantages if you really wanted to know—obliged by seizing her with careful brutality, pushing her face among some pillows, and tearing some rather high-priced underlinen, and despite the presence of young Rodolfo in a nearby room, they then double-jacked their way to a mutual explosion memorable only till the next time it happened, which was to be presently.

  The watershed moment, however, came in the course of one of the long postcoital monologues Ruperta somehow found necessary and which Reef had come to find sort of relaxing. He was almost ready to fall asleep when the name of Scarsdale Vibe entered the stream of idle chatter, and he reached for another cigarette.

  “Familiar name.”

  “I should think so. One of your American demigods.”

  “And he’s over here now?”

  “Tesoro, sooner or later everyone is. This Vibe person has been buying up Renaissance art in what even for an American is indecent haste. His next target according to the gossip is Venice. Perhaps he’ll buy it as well. Is he a friend of yours? I can’t quite imagine that, but we shall be in Venice soon, and then perhaps you’ll introduce us.”

  “Didn’t know I was invited along.”

  She gave him a look and, possibly by way of formal invitation, reached for his penis.

  PHILIPPE WAS AN ALUMNUS of the infamous children’s prison in Paris known as the Petite Roquette, and had gained an early appreciation of institutional spaces. He had become especially partial to cathedrals, and liked to think of this mountain as such a transcendent structure, with the tunnel as its apse. “In a cathedral what looks solid never is. Walls are hollow inside. Columns contain winding staircases. This apparently solid mountain is really a collection of hot springs, caves, fissures, passageways, one hiding-place within another—and the Tatzelwurms know it all intimately. They are the priesthood of their own dark religion—” He was interrupted by a scream.

  “Ndih’më!” It was coming from a little side gallery. “Nxito!”

  Reef ran into the smell of new-milled pine shoring and saw the Tatzelwurm, much bigger than he’d been led to expect, standing over Ramiz. The critter was depending on its looks to intimidate its victims, hypnotize them into some kind of compliance with their fate, and it seemed to be working on the Albanian. “Hey, Ace!” Reef yelled. The Tatzelwurm whipped its head around and stared him full in the eyes. Now I have seen you, was the message, now you are next on my list. Reef looked for something to hit it with. Drill bit in his hand was worn too short, nearest picks and shovels weren’t near enough, looked like his only bet was close quarters with the jacking hammer. By the time he’d figured this out, something had gone funny with the light, shadows had appeared where they shouldn’t have been, and the Tatzelwurm had disappeared.

  Ramiz had been working in his underwear and had a long gash on his leg that was bleeding pretty good. “Better get back to the spital,” Reef said, “get that seen to. Can you walk on it?”

  “I think so.”

  Philippe and a couple of others had shown up. “Be right with you all,” Reef said, “just want to make sure it’s gone.”

  “Here.” Philippe tossed him a Mannlicher eight-shot, which Reef could tell by the balance had a full magazine. He carefully stepped into the shadows.

  “Hello, Reef.” It seemed to leap out of the rock-face, condensed in a kinetic blur of lethal muscle and claw, screaming as it came.

  “Holy shit.” With the Tatzelwurm about a foot away, Reef had just time to squeeze off a shot, whereupon the critter exploded in a great green foul-smelling cloud of blood and tissue. He fired again just on general principles.

  “Green blood?” said Reef later, after a long shower.

  “Did we forget to mention that?” said Philippe.

  “It spoke my name.”

  “Ah, bien sûr.”

  “I heard it, Philippe.”

  “You have saved my life,” declared Ramiz, “and though we would both much prefer to forget the whole matter, I am now obliged, someday, somehow, to repay you. An Albanian never forgets.”

  “Thought that was an elephant.”

  He worked through to the end of the shift, showered again, unlocked his private pulley-rope, lowered his clothes from the overhead, hung his wet working gear on the hook, raised it again and padlocked the rope, got dressed, just like any other day. But this time he went in the office and collected his pay, and trudged down into Domodossola and didn’t look back. They had been good friends, that crew. It was a busy period of history. He might get to see some of them again.

  IT WAS SAID that great tunnels like the Simplon or St.-Gotthard were haunted, that when the train entered and the light of the world, day or night, had to be abandoned for the time of passage however brief, and the mineral roar made conversation impossible, then certain spirits who once had chosen to surrender into the fierce intestinal darkness of the mountain would reappear among the paying passengers, take empty seats, drink negligibly from the engraved glassware in the dining cars, assume themselves into the rising shapes of tobacco smoke, whisper a propaganda of memory and redemption to salesmen, tourists, the resolutely idle, the uncleansably rich, and other practitioners of forgetfulness, who could not sense the visitors with anything like the clarity of fugitives, exiles, mourners, and spies—all those, that is, who had reached agreement, even occasions of intimacy, with Time.

  Some of them, rarely but never quite by accident, were known to engage a passenger in conversation. Reef was alone in the smoking car, some nameless black hour, when a not entirely opaque presence appeared in the plush seat opposite.

  “What could you have been thinking?” he inquired. It was a voice Reef had not heard before but recognized nonetheless.

  “About what?”

  “You have a wife and child to look after and a father to avenge, and here you are in some damn lounge suit you didn’t pay for, smoking Havanas you wouldn’t ordinarily even know how to find, much less afford, in the company of a woman who has never had a thought that didn’t originate down there between her legs.”

  “Pretty direct.”

  “What happened to you? You were a promising young dynamiter, your father’s son, sworn to alter the social terrain, and now you’re hardly much better than the people you used to want to blow up. Look at them. Too much money and idle time, too little fucking compassion, Reef.”

  “I earned this. I put in my time.”

  “But you’ll never earn these f
olks’s respect or even any credibility. It’s never going to get much better than contempt. Clear all the happy horseshit out of your mind, try to remember what Webb looked like, at least. Then turn your thoughts to the man who had him murdered. Scarsdale Vibe is in easy reach right now. Scarsdale how-about-you-all-go-live-in-shit-and-die-young-so’s-I-can-stay-in-big-hotels-and-spend-millions-on-fine-art Vibe. Look him up when you’re down there in Venice, Italy. Better yet, sight him in. You can still stop all this idle fuckfuck, turn around, and get back to yourself again.”

  “Assuming for the sake of argument—”

  “We’re coming out of the tunnel. I have to be someplace else.”

  Kit and Yashmeen walked up from the little hotel in Intra, along the shore of the lake, to the churchyard at Biganzano, where Riemann’s grave was. Saloon steamers, private launches, and sailboats could be seen through the trees, out on the lake. Carriages and cargo wagons passed along the road. The tramontana blew her hair back from her face. Kit couldn’t keep from looking at her every step or two, though he’d rather’ve been staring into the sun.

  They had made the same journey as Riemann, who had arrived here in June of 1866 on his third and last visit, for which Göttingen professors Wilhelm Weber and Baron von Waltershausen had obtained some money from the government. Riemann knew he was dying. If he thought he was fleeing anything, it could not have been the hungry mouth of death, for this was in the middle of what would be known as the Seven Weeks’ War, and death was all around. Cassel and Hannover had fallen to the Prussians, the Hannoverian army under von Arentschildt, twenty thousand strong, had concentrated at Göttingen and begun to march south trying to escape the Prussian columns converging on them but were stopped by von Flies at Langensalza, and surrendered on June 29.

  Not that Riemann would find Italy any more tranquil. A bit to the east of Lago Maggiore, the final battle for the Veneto, between Austria and Italy, was shaping up. He had passed from the rationalized hell of the struggle for Germany into Sunny Italy and the summer of Custozza, and nine thousand dead, and five thousand missing, and soon down into his own casualty-list of one.