Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Yes, well, was there anything else Derrick? And why won’t this door open?”

  “No, no, we simply must chat. A jolly little chat. Won’t take long, I promise.”

  It seemed Theign wanted to talk about field skills. Not until later would Cyprian understand that this was a periodic exercise—Theign’s way of evaluating the current negotiability of those under his command he might wish one day to shop. But it struck Cyprian at the time only as a theoretical conversation about predators and prey, with Cyprian explaining the advantages of being the hunted.

  “So you end up smarter, sneakier, nastier than the competition,” Theign summarized. “Useful among professional pouffes, I shouldn’t wonder, but these engagements out here are a bit more than simple sodomitic rivalries. The consequences are rather more serious.”

  “Are they.”

  “We are talking about the fates of nations. The welfare, often the sheer survival, of millions. The axial loads of History. How can you compare—”

  “And how, vecchio fazool, can you fail to see the connection?”

  Theign had of course mastered in his first year at Naval Intelligence that blank and slightly openmouthed expression so useful to His Majesty’s agents abroad. It produced in Cyprian not the false sense of superiority intended but a queasy despair. He had never cared before, particularly, about being understood by an object of fascination. But somehow when it became obvious that Theign didn’t want to understand, Cyprian became guardedly terrified.

  “I’ve heard from Vienna, by the way. They have you scheduled in for next week. Here are your tickets.”

  “Second class.”

  “Mm. Yes.”

  Though ordinarily he enjoyed doing as he was told, and especially the contempt that went with that, Cyprian found himself puzzled now at Theign’s assumption that of course he would take the train back to Vienna unescorted, unsupervised, unquestioning, into the embrace of what he had assumed was the known enemy, instead of running for cover, as prey was expected to do.

  “We are coöperating fully with the Austrians in this matter,” Theign waited to let him know till Cyprian was boarding the train at the Santa Lucia Station, in a note delivered by an Italian urchin, who then disappeared into the swarm. “So in your conversations I would suggest sticking to English, as the German appropriate to your chosen métier may soon become exhausted.”

  The passage, especially from Venice to Graz, was not without moments of jollification, though it helped for one to have developed, if not an active taste for, at least the gift of concealing any revulsion from, local sausages, small pets, not always of the indoor sort, concertina music, and the peculiar whining accent of the region. Young Austrian cavalry Aspirants in that fatally alluring shade of aniline blue kept coming through from amusements elsewhere in the train and launching at him, as he imagined, glances of heated inquiry. As luck would have it, desire was off to parts undisclosed, on a species of budget holiday—with any number of sexual possibilities aboard, considered in both a professional and a recreational way, for some strange and he hoped not medical reason Cyprian spent the journey scowling, slouching, and brooding unstirred and, likely for that same reason, unapproached. It might have had something to do with Misha and Grisha, for it could not be easily imagined that the inconvenienced duo had simply shrugged off his defection, nor that an unknown number of part-time contract workers across this continent and the next would not be seeking to restore the balance-sheets on their behalf—while queued up behind the Russians waited the Evidenzbüro, who had not wished compromised their own surveillance of the Colonel, the British Secret Service, obliged at least to keep an eye on those employees abroad who consort with known intelligence operatives from elsewhere in Europe, plus Turkish, Serbian, French, and Italian nonce-operatives, as the politics of the day might demand, all regarding Cyprian as a likely candidate for deception, assault, and elimination. In terrible fact, he was now running for his life.

  Cyprian Latewood’s return to Vienna was accompanied either in or outside of his head by the Adagio from the Mozart Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488. It might have been prophetic, had he been listening. This was a period in the history of human emotion when “romance” had slipped into an inexpensive subfusc of self-awareness, unnaturally heightening the effect of the outmoded pastels peeping from beneath, as if in some stylistic acknowledgment of the great trembling that showed through, now and then, to some more than others, of a hateful future nearly at hand and inescapable. But many were as likely to misinterpret the deep signals as physical symptoms, or another case of “nerves,” or, like the earlier, dimmer Cyprian, some kind of “romance” in the offing, however little prepared he might have been for that.

  The Vienna interviews went pleasantly enough. The Hotel Klomser, only a few blocks from the War Ministry, served apparently as a traditional spot for discussions like this. Colonel Khäutsch was mentioned only in euphemisms and circumlocutions, some of them, given Cyprian’s imperfect grasp of the idiom, nearly impenetrable. Local baked goods were kept within his easy reach in piles far exceeding normal angles of repose. The coffee here, internationally respected as an aid to loquacity, had been roasted with fanatical precision on ultramodern machines whose heating-times, chamber temperatures, and humidities could be read to hundredths of a unit, suggestive of either a local Feinschmeckerei evolved far beyond that of the rest of the world, or just the usual compulsive application of any engineering improvement, however trivial.

  “That is, if we may regard the history of civilization as distinguished by the asymptotic approach of industrial production tolerances, with time, to some mythical, never-attained Zero. What do you think, Mr. Latewood?”

  “Wehggnh ucchh uh gweh-ungghh nyuk aikh annkh ngkh hnnh ikhgghhlnghawh,” replied Cyprian, his speech losing, into a congested volume of Sachertorte mit Schlag, much of whatever acceleration it was picking up from the coffee, though the interrogators were able to recognize this as, “There was a question just like that on my little-go.”

  Theign had warned him about the interviewing techniques. “Don’t be too clever with them. ‘Mit Schlag’ could easily take on another meaning.”

  Cyprian was surprised to learn how well known Theign was in this town, and how many people were eager to be remembered to him. Over his years on the Vienna station Theign had apparently put together his own prætorian apparatus, more or less by intuition, and in the strangely crowded daytime corridors of the Hotel Klomser, Cyprian was introduced to some of them.

  He recalled having run into Miskolci around the Prater, had in fact narrowly avoided once or twice doing business with him. Miskolci was not exactly a vampire, but in obedience to phases of the moon had been known to go about randomly waylaying and rudely biting the odd civilian. Back in the late ‘90s, when vampirism became fashionable owing to the international popularity of the novel Dracula, granting biters of all sorts license to obey their impulses in public, Miskolci discovered that, far from being alone with a depraved taste, he was part of a quite-extensive community. A subcircuit of the Buda-Pesth telephone exchange had apparently been reserved for the use of hæmatophages, as they were then known, so one of Miskolci’s most valuable assets, for Theign, had been this red haze of connective threadwork, already in being, which surrounded him. His own specialized gift had lain secret until one week at the height of the first Moroccan crisis, when it became desperately essential to know the mobilization schedule of a certain army corps. Theign’s shop had the right prima donna, but she had become somehow reluctant to sing. “Perhaps I can help,” offered Miskolci. “Lock us in, come back in an hour.” An eventful hour—Theign could hear the screaming through the soundproofing and around a couple of turns in the corridor. When next seen, the subject appeared superficially unharmed but upon scrutiny carrying in his eyes an expression that gave some of Theign’s colleagues unsettling dreams for years afterward—as if written there was an introduction to ancient mysteries better left mysterious.

  Thei
gn had met Dvindler in the baths, which at the time, he was finding convenient for fact-gathering—though he had learned after no more than a single visit to avoid the Zentralbad, where one found nothing beyond a literalism of the hydropathic. For the more poetic list of features he sought, Theign must spend time looking in the outer districts. Eventually the Astarte-Bad, far out on one of the “K” or river-quay lines, proved to be the ticket— Viennese Orientalism taken to newly questionable frontiers of taste, lurid mosaics showing pre-biblical orgies sort of thing. A non-Teutonics-only hiring policy. The sexes, perhaps by design, imperfectly segregated, so that one might at any clouded turn of a corridor stumble into the partner of one’s dreams, though in practice one seldom did. The new construction always going on somewhere in acoustical contact suggested relatively low property values out here, which, far from distracting, was by many interpreted as erotic.

  “For constipation,” Dvindler announced by way of self-introduction, “rely upon it, F.I.P., or Faradically Induced Peristalsis, is quite the best thing.”

  “Excuse me,” Theign said, “do I take that to mean you actually intend to run an electrical current, how shall I put this delicately—”

  “There is no way to put it delicately,” Dvindler said. “Komm, I’ll show you.”

  Theign looked around. “Shouldn’t there be a physician or something in attendance?”

  “It takes five minutes to learn how. It is not brain surgery!” Dvindler chortled. “Now, where is that rectal electrode? Someone always— Ah!” producing a long cylinder with a knob of a certain size on one end and a wire coming out the other, which led to an interruptor device, whose primary coil was connected to what seemed to Theign an alarming number of Leclanché cells, hooked up in series. “Hand me that jar of Cosmoline, if you would be so kind.”

  Theign, expecting to be repelled, found himself looking on in fascination. Apparently the trick was to coördinate two electrodes, one inserted in the rectum and the other to be rolled about on the abdominal surface, enabling the current flowing between to simulate a peristaltic wave. If the application was successful, one excused oneself and headed rapidly for some nearby toilet. If not, well, besides being part of a general program of intestinal health, the procedure was valued by some, such as Dvindler, on its own merits.

  “Electricity! the force of the future—for everything, you know, including the élan vital itself, will soon be proven electrical in nature.”

  The interruptor on the secondary coil made a not disagreeable buzzing sound, which after a while seemed to blend in with the liquid echoes of the larger establishment. Dvindler was singing quite cheerfully to himself, a tune of the city which Theign slowly recognized as Beda Chanson’s “Ausgerechnet Bananen.” On the way out, he borrowed five K. from Theign for the battery fee.

  And as for Yzhitza, well, Theign must have been having an especially bad couple of weeks, because she mistook him for a German businessman desperately in need of recreation, addressing him in what she imagined to be his native tongue, so that for a few minutes he was less than clear about what was going on. But somehow, despite his low energy state and an attitude toward women that never got more comfortable than ambivalent, he was surprised to find his sexual interest kindled, indeed commanded, by this actually quite ordinary-looking professional. At times, he had to admit, enjoying himself inordinately. “Liebling, you were never even a challenge,” she confessed later, after rolling up for him a record of success at what the Kundschaftsstelle liked to call “Honigfalle work” that only one or two rogue historians might disagree had changed the course of European history. By then Theign had moved on into much colder operational country, and could nod impassively, taking it at face value.

  ON WEEKDAY EVENINGS CYPRIAN, appearing each time measurably fatter, even to the casual surveillant, came lurching out of the same back exit of the Klomser and made his way—his thoughts interrupted only by an occasional high C from Leo Slezak over at the Opera House—sometimes by Fiaker, sometimes on the Verbindungsbahn if he saw a train coming, to his old sanctuary of desire the Prater, though nothing much was then ever observed to take place. The declining sun was a chilled and violent orange, throwing opaque indigo shadows full of foreboding—owls patrolled the vast park, marionettes occupied tiny volumes of light in a general dusk, the music was as horrible as ever.

  It was nostalgia for its own sake, really. The more he found himself addressed—even called out to—as “Dickwanst” and “Fettarsch,” the more his Prater-longings began to ebb, and he turned to quarters of the city he would not, as recently as months ago, even fleetingly have considered, such as Favoriten, where he went to move among the crowds of Bohemian workmen when the factory shifts changed, not so much seeking exotic flirtation as to be absorbed somehow into a mobility, a bath of language he did not speak, as he had once sought in carnal submission an escape route from what it seemed of the world he was being asked to bear. . . .

  He kept blundering into huge Socialist demonstrations. Traffic came to an astonished halt as tens of thousands of working-class men and women moved in silence down the Ringstraße. “Well!” Cyprian heard an onlooker remark, “talk about the slow return of the repressed!” The police were out in large numbers, with head-assault high on their list of activities. Cyprian caught a couple of good whacks and found upon hitting the pavement that his recent weight gain was an unforeseen asset.

  Out on his perambulations one day, he heard from an open upstairs window a piano student, forever to remain invisible, playing exercises from Carl Czerny’s School of Velocity, op. 299. Cyprian had paused to listen to those moments of passionate emergence among the mechanical fingerwork, and at that moment Yashmeen Halfcourt came around the corner. If he had not stopped for the music, he would have been around another corner by the time she reached the spot where he was standing.

  For a moment they stared, both seeming to recognize an act of mutual salvation. “In four dimensions,” she said later, as they sat in a coffeehouse in Mariahilf at the sharp intersection of two busy streets, at the vertex of two long narrow rooms, able to see down the length of both, “it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  She had a job at a dressmaker/milliner’s nearby, owing, she thought, to the hidden intercession of the T.W.I.T., because one day on the racks there had appeared a version of the Snazzbury’s Silent Frock she once had been measured for in London.

  “What I really need is a cloak of invisibility to go with it,” she supposed.

  “Surveillance.”

  “Since you put it that way.”

  “One of those conclusions I find I jump to more and more these days. Do you know who it is?”

  “I think they’re local. But some Russians as well.”

  The schoolgirl confidence he remembered was no longer there—something significant had shaken her. He was surprised at how far he thought he could see into her present difficulties, farther than she would have known how to give him credit for, farther than he could have himself imagined a year and a half ago. He patted her gloved hands, he hoped not as awkwardly as it felt. “If it’s only the Okhrana, that’ll be easy—there isn’t one who can’t be bought, and they work for kopecks. The Austrians might prove a bit more problematic, especially if it’s the Kundschaftsstelle.”

  “The city police I could understand, but . . .” With such unstudied bewilderment in her voice that he had to step away, pretending to brush his hat, so as not to lunge into the obvious and counterproductive embrace this might, to another smitten youth, have called for in the circs.

  “If you are willing to wait a few days—no more than a week, say—there might be a way I can help.”

  Having no doubt heard this sort of thing, with required changes of emphasis, from other men in less-perilous times, she narrowed her eyes, yet waited another half-moment, as if allowing some further point to become clear. “You have had dealings with them before. Both offices.”

  “The Okhrana are playing on a somewhat unpredictable pitch just now. D
oings in the East—the Japanese war, rebellions up and down the rail lines. It’s a good time to redeem one’s tickets . . . so I’m told. As for the Austrians . . . they may require a bit more intensive labor.”

  “Cyprian, I cannot—”

  Resisting what was almost the need to place a gloved finger across her lips, “The question will not arise. Let us see what will happen.” Perversely, he was pleased—though less pleased with himself for feeling so—at the way she hesitated now, as if unwilling to lie because she could no longer gauge how successfully he might catch her out.

  He tried to stay off the subject of what he’d been up to himself, assuming she’d think whatever she thought. When Venice came up, she only said, “Oh, Cyprian, how lovely. I’ve never been there.”

  “In a strange way, neither have I. As a matter of fact—do you have a moment?”

  They were in the Volks-Prater, and there happened to be nearby a popular facsimile of Venice known as Venedig in Wien. “I know it’s frightfully decadent of me, but I’ve come to think of this as the real Venice, the one I never get to see. These gondolas are real, actually, and so are the gondolieri.”

  Cyprian and Yashmeen bought tickets and boarded one of the gondolas, and lay back together and watched the foreign sky stream past. Every now and then, a replica of some Venetian landmark—the Doge’s Palace, or the Ca’ d’Oro—would come looming up. “First time I rode in one of these,” Cyprian said, “was here. If I hadn’t come to Vienna, I probably never would have.”

  “I doubt I ever shall.”