Forty years later on, their own plunge through Deep Germany, into the folk-dream behind the Black Forest, where there was said to be room for a hundred thousand troops and ten times as many elves, Kit and Yashmeen had found themselves trying to spend as much time in the train as possible. At Göttingen there had been at least the sense that one was still connected, however tenuously, to the rest of Europe. But as they moved southward and consonants began to grow blurry, presently there was much less to engage the rational mind—instead, everywhere, elf-grottoes, castles, set dramatically on pinnacles, to which there was no visible access, country people in dirndls and peculiar green hats, Gothic churches, Gothic breweries, shadows with undulating tails and moving wings passing across the valley floors. “Maybe I need a drink,” said Kit. “Schnapps, something. How about you, my turtledove?”
“Call me that one more time in public,” she advised serenely, “and I shall strike you with a piece of furniture.”
Other passengers were enchanted. “Aren’t they sweet,” wives observed, and husbands blessed them with pipesmoke.
At the Haupt-Bahnhof in Frankfurt, the largest railway station in Germany, known locally as “the Wonderstructure at the Gallows-field,” the station restaurant seemed to breathe hesitantly, as if still not quite recovered from the Wagnerian moment five or six years earlier when the brakes failed on an Orient Express engine and it jumped the tracks and came crashing into the restaurant among the marble pillars and chandeliers and chattering diners, another incursion into the bourgeois calm to join the collapses of the Campanile in Venice and of the roof at the Charing Cross Station in London only a year before, nonlethal equivalents of an Anarchist bomb, though some believed equally laden with intent.
To Kit and Yashmeen, it seemed more like the revenge of Deep Germany on the modern age of steam. They bought sandwiches in the buffets and kept close to the train, clinging with increasing desperation to the machinery of transport against the onset of a lassitude thick as grease, a creeping surrender to the shameless German primitivism all around them. Switzerland arrived just in time, rising before them like a lime sorbet after a steady diet of roasted ducks and assorted goose products.
AT RIEMANN’S GRAVE she swept off her hat and stood with her head bowed, allowing the mountain wind to do as it wished with her hair. “No,” as if answering a voice which had just suggested it, “I think I should not cry.” Kit waited with his hands in his pockets and a respect for whatever it was that had her so in its grasp.
“In Russia, when I was a small child,” Yashmeen continued after a while, “I should not remember it now, but I do, wanderers, wild-looking men, came to our doors seeking shelter as if they were entitled to it. They were the stranniki—once, they had led everyday lives like other men, had their families and work, houses filled with furniture, children’s toys, pots and pans, clothes, all the tack of domestic life. Then one day they simply turned—walked out through the door and away from that, from all of it—whatever had held them there, history, love, betrayals forgiven or not, property, nothing mattered now, they were no longer responsible to the world, let alone the Tsar—only God could claim them, their only allegiance was to God. In my little town, and it was said all over Russia, families had dug secret rooms beneath their houses, where these men could rest on their journeys. The Government feared them more than it feared Social Democrats, more than bomb-throwers, ‘Very dangerous,’ Papa assured us—we knew he didn’t mean dangerous to us—we also understood it was our duty to help them in their passage. Their holy mission. Even with them down under the house, we slept as peacefully as we ever did. Perhaps more so. We told each other stories about them, ambassadors from some mysterious country very far away, unable to return to that homeland because the way back was hidden. They had to keep wandering the world whose deceptions and melodramas, blood and desire, we had begun to sense, perhaps not seeking anything with a name, perhaps only wandering. People called them podpol’niki, underground men. Floors that had once been solid and simple became veils over another world. It was not the day we knew that provided the stranniki their light.”
Kit had one of those moments of extralogical grasp more appropriate to mathematical work. “Then leaving Göttingen . . .”
“Leaving Göttingen. No. It was never my choice,” as if trying to explain it to Riemann, to the fraction of him that had lingered here forty years as if waiting for the one graveside confession he must not miss, “not for any trivial reason. Not when it means exile into . . .” she did not quite include Kit in her gesture—“this. Whatever hopes I may have had for the ζ-function, for the new geometry, for transcendence by way of any of that, must be left behind, souvenirs of a girl’s credulity, a girl I scarcely know anymore. At Göttingen I had no visitation, no prophecy, no plan, I was only safe . . . safe in my studies, comfortably in and out the doorways of the daily farces and flirtations, the quiet Sunday walks up on the wall around the old town. Now I am expelled from the garden. Now in a smooth enough World-Line comes this terrible discontinuity. And on the far side of it, I find that now I am also strannik.” Her extraordinary eyes remained directed at the grave. “There are teachers. Teachers who have us for a while, allow us to see particular things, and then send us on, without regard to how we may have come to feel about them. We depart, wondering if now, perhaps, we will not be in a state of departure forever. We go off to dwell night by night beneath the floors of Europe, on another sort of journey into another sort of soul, in which we must discard everything, not only the objects we possess but everything we have taken to be ‘real,’ all we have learned, all the work we have put in, the theorems, the proofs, the questioning, the breath-taken trembling before the beauty of an intractable problem, all of which was perhaps illusion.”
It did seem to him she might be putting it a little dramatically. “Letting all of that go.” He wanted to light up a cigarette but held himself there, tense. “Big step, Yashmeen.”
She gazed for a while through the wind back at Monte Rosso, and the lighted Swiss peaks beyond. “It was so easy to forget this other world out here, with its enemies and intrigues and pestilent secrets. . . . I knew it must claim me again, I had no choice, but, Kit, you . . . perhaps no one after all has the right to ask. . . .”
“Just an innocent American cowpoke don’t know what he stumbled into. Why do you say ‘no choice’? You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“No. Not really.”
YASHMEEN HAD ARRANGED to re-connect with elements of the T.W.I.T. at the fabled Sanatorium Böpfli-Spazzoletta, on the Swiss side of Lago Maggiore. Kit, not sure if he’d be welcome, tagged along anyway. The place was gigantic, offering enough of a range in levels of taste to please everyone, from the most god-awful kitsch to austere anterooms of death befitting the consumptive chic then so enchanting Europe. They had to wander around for twenty minutes before they could even figure out how to ask directions. From somewhere came sounds of a dance orchestra, though it was still pretty early in the day.
“Act normal, Kit. And don’t say my name.”
It would’ve taken Kit a minute anyway to recognize Reef—who this had to be—seeing that his brother had undergone some redesign, the hat being a high-crowned black Borsalino whose brim was Reef-modified to keep the rain off at least, the suit definitely not of American cut, his hair longer and strangely greased, his mustache gone. Kit would have taken him for a tourist from someplace out in Deep Europe, except for the voice, and the old amiable lopsidedness to his face so long beaten at by realities difficult to mistake for other than American—personable as it needed to be, but only when it needed to be, the rest of the time wary and remote.
“Long way from ’em San Juans,” Kit mumbled. “Just where’n the hell did you blow in from?” feeling this stealthy onset of emotion. But Reef was being cautious.
“Tunnelin for the railroads,” gesturing outside with his head, “Alps and so forth.” They sat there nodding and beaming a while. “Little cardplay in the hydropathics
maybe. How come you’re not back in the U.S., hobnobbin with that summer set at Newport, Rhode Island, playin polo, whatever.”
“Guess you’d say I’m on the run.” While Reef slowly shook his head and pretended to snicker, Kit gave him the abridged version, up to spotting Foley in Göttingen. “Really all went sour the minute it started, I should’ve got off before Glenwood Springs, turned around, come back, but . . .” But couldn’t figure how to say more. Somewhere not far below these social niceties was a moment that waited, something to do with their father and some terrible calculating, with brothers seeing each other again, with re-connection of paths and promises and so forth, and Kit would just as soon it all took its time arriving.
Reef watched him fret for a while. “Some night we’ll stay up all night and swap should-ofs, meantime be content that you held on longer’n me at least.”
“Just stupid. Just slow. Can’t believe how long it took me to see.” Kit sat there watching the floor as if it might drop away, nodding as if listening to himself. A waiter came by and Reef asked him something in some dialect that got him a quizzical over-the-shoulder second look.
“Like the man never heard tunnel Italian before.”
Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin and her party had descended by way of the St.-Gotthard Tunnel from league after league of peaks like ocean waves frozen in place, fading into merciless light, tending to eternity—a circuit of Alpine hotels and hydropathics so remote the hotels had to print up their own postal stamps just to get mail as far as a regular Swiss post office, full of giggling nitwits, quite a number of them British actually, running about the corridors, jumping off balconies into the snowdrifts, hiding in serving-pantries and falling down dumbwaiter shafts. They had detrained at Bellinzona, where the motor-diligence from the Sanatorium was waiting for them, and so up to the famed institution overlooking the Swiss shores of Lago Maggiore. Goats grazing by the roadside turned their heads to watch them pass, as if long familiar with Böpfli-Spazzoletta clientele. From somewhere came a repeated figure being played on an alpenhorn.
Though he was not ready to share it with his brother, not even Reef had been exempt from the folly up there. “What kind of a dog’s that?” he asked Ruperta at one point.
“Mouffette? She’s a papillon . . . a sort of French ladies’ lapdog.”
“A—You say,” gears in his mind beginning to crank, “‘lap’—French . . . lap-dog?” Somehow gathering that Ruperta had trained her toy spaniel to provide intimate “French” caresses of the tongue for the pleasure of its mistress. “Well! you two are . . . pretty close then, I guess?”
“I wuv my ickle woofwoof, ess I doo!” Squeezing the animal tightly, one would think painfully, except for the apparent enjoyment with which Mouffette was fluttering her eyelids.
“Hmm,” said Reef.
“And today I must go across the lake, and the mean old people there won’t allow my ickle pwecious to come with Mummy, and we were both wondering if her good Uncle Reef would look after her for the day, see that she gets her chopped filet and her boiled pheasant, as she’s so particular.”
“Sure, you bet!” His thoughts taking wing. The day alone with a French “lap” dog! who might be more than happy to do for Reef what she was obviously already doing for old ‘Pert here! who in fact, m-maybe all this time’s been just droolin’ for one-them penises for a change, and will turn out to know plenty of tricks! A-and—
It took a while for Ruperta to get her toilette perfect and her bustle out the door. Reef found himself pacing and smoking, and whenever he took a look over at Mouffette could’ve sworn she was fidgeting too. The dog, it seemed to Reef, was giving him sidewise looks which if they’d come from a woman you would have had to call flirtatious. Finally after an extended farewell notable for its amount of saliva exchange, Mouffette slowly padded over to the divan where Reef was sitting and jumped up to sit next to him. Jumping on the furniture was something Ruperta seldom allowed her to do, and her gaze at Reef clearly assumed that he would not get upset. Far from it, what he actually got was an erection. Mouffette looked it over, looked away, looked back, and suddenly jumped up on his lap.
“Oboy, oboy.” He stroked the diminutive spaniel for a while until, with no warning, she jumped off the couch and slowly went into the bedroom, looking back now and then over her shoulder. Reef followed, taking out his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. “Here, Mouffie, nice big dog bone for you right here, lookit this, yeah, seen many of these lately? come on, smells good don’t it, mmm, yum!” and so forth, Mouffette meantime angling her head, edging closer, sniffing with curiosity. “That’s right, now, o-o-open up . . . good girl, good Mouffette now let’s just put this—yaahhgghh!”
Reader, she bit him. After which, as if surprised at the vehemence of his reaction, Mouffette jumped off the bed and while Reef went looking for an ice bucket, ran off somehow into the vast hotel. Reef chased her for a while but found it was getting him funny looks from the staff.
In the days that followed, Mouffette took every occasion to jump up in Reef’s lap and gaze into his eyes—sarcastically, it seemed to Reef—opening her mouth suggestively, sometimes even drooling. Each time Reef tried not to flinch. Each time Ruperta, exasperated, would cry, “Honestly, it isn’t as if she means to bite you.”
“REEF, allow me to present Miss Yashmeen Halfcourt. Yash, this strange-lookin old skeezicks is my brother Reef.”
“A pleasure, Miss Halfcourt.”
“Mr. Traverse.” For a minute she had thought she was seeing Kit and his own somehow aged or gravely assaulted double. “I see you move in smart society,” shifting her eyes to the Chirpingdon-Groin party.
“Luck of the rails, miss,” a roguish readjustment Kit had seen too often beginning to creep among his brother’s features. “It seems one day they needed a fourth player for this game they call ‘auction’ bridge, all the go now in the London clubs, I’m told, scores much higher than the regular bridge game, you see, so if one is playing for so much a point, why . . .” The old wistful shrug, as if to say, Easy me, what can I do? It’s my curse, just a mark who can’t resist a big payoff. Kit with an effort refrained from gazing heavenward.
“Yes. It’s very like a Russian game we call vint.”
“Heard of that one. Never could catch on to the scoring, though. Maybe you’ll teach it to me sometime.”
Across the vast reception hall, Ruperta’s ears, emerging from her coiffure, were observed to grow rapidly incandescent.
“Well,” as she put it later, “your brother’s little wog seems to’ve taken quite a fancy to you. He’s rather a fresh face himself, perhaps we might arrange a swap, what do you think?”
“Strictly business, ‘Pert.”
“Obviously. You couldn’t call her nobility—the shallowest sort of avantyuristka, I can’t believe they even let persons like that in the door here, I believe I shall have a word in fact with Marcello.”
“Now, ‘Pert, try to think back, it wa’n’t ’at long ago you were playin pretty much the same hand.”
“You hateful beast.”
Meantime, Kit and Yashmeen sat eating dinner at a table with a view of the darkening lake and an evening storm sweeping up from the south.
“Reef was always the reckless one,” he recalled, “what folks call ‘wild,’ and Frank was the reasonable one, may’ve gone crazy now and then for a minute and a half, but I was never around to see it.”
“And what about you, Kit?”
“Oh, I was just the baby.”
“I think you were the religious one.” Hard to tell just then if she was teasing. “Look at what you got into. Sectarian vector wars, trafficking with the unseen, priesthoods and heresies . . .”
“Guess it was always pretty practical for me.” It wasn’t, but he’d have to wait for some three o’clock mathematician’s insomnia to work any of that through.
She was looking at him meanwhile in a way he knew he should be smart enough to decipher. “In the world. Of the world. No,�
�� shaking her head, “vows of abstinence, or . . .”
It did not help his abrupt discombobulancy that Yashmeen had showed up looking exceptionally radiant, her black hair pouring all the way down to her waist, where it whispered against the bow at the back of a frock that seemed made only to flirt in, her mouth carefully rouged in a shadowy cerise into the first derivative of a kiss of unknown duration. . . . Just damned impossibly nifty, is what he supposed he meant.
“No money in Vectors,” he blurted, “that’s a whole range of luxury items right there. Abstinence takes care of itself, pretty much.”
“But there was no end to the distraction. Did you expect quite so much? I didn’t. There always seemed to be something.” She glanced his way, experimentally. “Someone.”
“Oh,” his pulse growing percussive, “helps to be easy on the eyeballs, no doubt.”
She was smiling, but with her eyes narrowed. Seemed to be waiting for him to pursue the thought, though he had no idea where. “Well,” cursing himself in the instant, “I wonder what that old Günni’s been up to. Must be in Mexico by now.”
Her eyes drifted away, as if into some private realm of annoyance. “Would you really have fought a duel over me, Kit?”
“You mean Günni and me both, or just me?” What was wrong with his brain here?
“You, Kit.”
It called for at least a moment of speculative gazing, but Kit only bounced back, “Why sure, who wouldn’t?” She waited an extra heartbeat, then put down her glass and looked around for her reticule. “I say something?”
“You didn’t say something.” She was on her feet and extending a gloved hand. “Ite, Missa est.”
Lionel Swome had no objection to Kit dossing at the Sanatorium, and Reef found him in his room opening the free bottle of Champagne that had come with it.
Against the Day Page 87