Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Her voice brought him a twinge. He couldn’t remember seeing her ever quite this miserable. He would have done anything, for that instant, to see her somehow restored to her old impossible ways. Except perhaps blurt, “I’ll take you. I promise.” Instead he thought he’d better go in to speak with Ratty McHugh.

  “So!” cried Ratty with a certain forced joviality, “here we all are again. Yashmeen still in the picture, I see.” He seemed to Cyprian not so much puzzled as curious in a professional way.

  “Not quite as she was.”

  “She always made me think of Hypatia. Before the Christian mobs of course.”

  “More of a sibyl these days. Deeper than maths, but that’s as far as I can see. Perhaps because of some rogue psychic gift, perhaps only the secular gravity of whatever her father is up to out in Inner Asia, she’s being bedeviled by two or three Powers at once, England as you must know something of already, Russia, of which she is officially still a citizen, and Austria, with of course Germany towering in the shadows backstage, whispering cues.”

  “The Shambhalan Question no doubt. Yes and it hasn’t half been playing havoc with the old rota, putting blokes into Colney Hatch at quite an unprecedented rate. If it were my department I’d have had Auberon Halfcourt pulled back years ago. No one even knows where the bloody place is, for pity’s sake.”

  “Perhaps if we—”

  “Oh of course we should meet, I’m only complaining in a recreational way, or do I mean therapeutic? Let’s make it the Dobner shall we, that’s the look we’ll need, a simple reunion of English co-alumni.”

  So amid the click of billiard balls and exquisite whores with tiny waists and huge darkened eyelids and lashes and sumptuously plumed hats, Yashmeen and Ratty shook hands across the moderate distance produced by a few years out of University, though Cyprian was pleased to see him semi-smitten and then embarrassed because of it. Not that Yash hadn’t gone out of her way today with an ensemble of beaded crêpe lisse in some æthereal shade of violet, and a terribly smart hat whose plumage sent enchanting shadows across her face. After a spell of appropriate theatre, they went off carefully, separately, to rendezvous at a nondescript apartment nearby, behind the Getreidemarkt, one of several maintained by Ratty’s shop for purposes just such as these.

  By the unwritten rules of these transitory dwellings, the cupboards yielded a sketchy culinary history of those who had passed through—bottles of Szekszárdi Vörös, Gewürztraminer and apricot brandy, chocolates, coffee, biscuits, tinned sausages, wine, boxes of dried noodles of various shapes and sizes, a white cloth bag of tarhonya from the previous century.

  “Are these the same Russians you remember from Göttingen?”

  She raised her brows and turned up her palms.

  “For or against the Tsar I mean, it does make a difference. Obviously there’s the Anglo-Russian Entente, but the other lot, though technically Russians I suppose, are also the most evil sort of bomb-chucking Socialistic dregs aren’t they, more than happy to see all Romanoffs obliterated, and no hesitation to make deals with anyone, including Germany, that might hasten the day.”

  “Why, Ratty,” said Cyprian, mild as could be. “Some would say they’re the only hope Russia has.”

  “Oh don’t let’s . . . please. Was there anyone else?”

  “People who said they were from Berlin. They would appear without warning. Wishing to meet. Sometimes we did. Usually in the rooms of a Dr. Werfner.”

  “The one Renfrew was always on about,” Ratty nodded, writing rapidly. “His so-called conjugate. And . . . this was something political?”

  “Ha!”

  “Ever so sorry, delete that—”

  “It sounded disingenuous,” she smiled. “What isn’t political? Where have you been since we were children at Cambridge?”

  “The suburbs of Hell,” said Cyprian.

  “Bringing you from Göttingen to Vienna—might it have been merely some loco parentis tactic of the T.W.I.T. to separate you from this Otzovist lot? Aren’t Chunxton Crescent aware of how simply teeming with Bolshies Vienna is these days?”

  “It may not be the whole story,” she admitted, “ . . . there seemed also to be an . . . Hungarian element.”

  Ratty took hold of his head and held on to it firmly. “Explain. Please.”

  “We did spend a week or two in Buda-Pesth. Took the steamer down the Danube, met with some rather peculiar people in smocks. . . .”

  “How’s that.”

  “This sort of anti-fraud uniform everyone has to wear when they’re doing research into what they call down there the ‘parapsychical.’ No pockets, all but transparent, rather short hemline . . .”

  “I say. You didn’t, ehrm, happen to bring one back with you, or . . . ?”

  “Why, Cyprian.”

  “Yes actually Cyps, if we could stay on the topic for just a moment longer—what I suppose we are most interested in knowing, Miss Halfcourt, is why they all left Vienna as suddenly as they did.”

  “I must be very clear with you, that this aptitude of mine, if it exists, has little to do with ‘predicting the future.’ Some of those who were with me here and in Buda-Pesth believe that they can. But—”

  “Perhaps somebody ‘saw’ something? Compelling enough to leave town because of? If it’s anything we can verify . . . please, do go on. Since Mrs. Burchell’s astoundingly prophetic account of the Serbian outrage, my principals have been quite receptive to the less-orthodox sources.”

  “They were terrified. Not a matter of whether but of how soon, something—some event, or set of events—would happen. The Russians above all—far beyond the usual nervnost’, which since the revolution has been the national malady.”

  “Was anyone specific?”

  “Not with me. I would come into a room, they would literally have their heads together, and when they saw me, they’d stop talking and pretend everything was normal.”

  “And it hadn’t to do with a certain . . .” pretending himself to finger a dossier, “Monsieur Azeff, notorious for blowing up Romanoffs whilst shopping his comrades, in on whom the Socialist Revolutionary hounds are said now to be closing at last—”

  “Oh, Yevno, that clown. Not particularly, no. Though of course his name has been coming up for years. But not enough to cause this degree of fear. As if what towered above them out there in the dark, across the lines, were not exactly a new and terrible weapon but the spiritual equivalent of one. A desire in the mass co-conscious for death and destruction.”

  “I say, how jolly. And so you woke up one morning and found—”

  “They didn’t all vanish at once. After a bit one began to notice this ominous vacuum. But I saw no point in asking. Having twigged that no one intended to tell me.”

  “Was that to spare you information that might’ve upset you? Or did they imagine that you were involved somehow?”

  “Whatever they had expected of me in Buda-Pesth, I had failed them. But that might have been separate from this other matter of the departures. Could I borrow a cigarette from somebody?”

  FRESH FLOWERS IN THE ROOM, silver coffeepots and cream jugs, surrounding a darázsfészek, a somewhat oversize Dobos torte, a Rigó Jancsi, rain at the windows, a single opening in the dark sky allowing a shaft of sunlight far down Váci út to illuminate the dismal slum of Angel’s Field.

  Madame Eskimoff looked pale and grim. Lajos Halász, one of the local sensitives, had fallen asleep in the bathtub, remaining that way for the next three days. Lionel Swome was seldom observed away from the telephone, either murmuring with apprehensive glances at the others or listening attentively to the schedule of telephonic transmissions—which the hotel subscribed to and were available to all guests—listening for a stock-exchange report, a sports result, an operatic aria, an unnameable item of intelligence. . . . “Why not just have the bloody thing surgically sewn to your ear!” screamed the Cohen. “Here’s another idea,” Swome replied, at this point actually attempting, in a somewhat more than half
hearted way, to insert the instrument into the Cohen’s anus, the presence of trousers notwithstanding.

  Everyone had lost patience, bickering even when silent—

  “As if by telepathy,” Ratty suggested brightly.

  “No. They were all talking out loud. Telepathy under those conditions would’ve been impossible.”

  AFTER THE INTERVIEW with old Ratty, Yashmeen seemed to regain her spirit. “Lovely to see you back to your old self,” said Cyprian.

  “And who would that be?”

  They were out strolling in the evening and had wandered into Spittelberggaße, where Viennese of both sexes, in the limitless civic passion for window-shopping, were inspecting a variety of women intriguingly displayed in lighted show-windows up and down the street. Yashmeen and Cyprian paused before one of these, through which a lady in a black corset and matching aigrette, with a certain air of command about her, gazed back.

  Yashmeen nodded at his visibly erect penis. “You seem interested.” She had suspected in men—particular men, now and then—a desire for self-surrender, having noted it in Cyprian as long ago as Cambridge. All but pulling him through the streets, she approached and inspected a number of cafés before arriving at one in Josephstadt. “This looks all right. Come along.”

  “A bit elegant. Are we celebrating something?”

  “You’ll see.”

  When they were left alone, she said, “Now, about this frightfully irregular sexual life of yours, Cyprian—whatever are we to do?”

  Aware of exceeding even the most indulgent of limits to self-pity, “I should mention I’ve been a catamite these last few years. Someone whose pleasure has never really mattered. Least of all to me.”

  “Imagine that it does now.” Beneath the virginal tablecloth, she had lifted her foot, her shapely foot in its closely laced wine-cordovan boot, the tip of whose toe she now placed unambiguously against his penis. To his bewilderment, that hitherto disrespected member grew swiftly attentive. “Now,” beginning rhythmically to press and release, “tell me how this feels.” But he could not trust himself to speak, only smile reluctantly and shake his head—yet in another moment he had “spent,” almost painfully, in his trousers, rattling the coffee service and the pastry plates and soaking the tablecloth extensively with coffee in his efforts to avoid notice. Around them the restaurant went its imperturbable way. “There now.”

  “Yashmeen—”

  “Your first time with a woman, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “I—hm? what are you—we . . . didn’t . . .”

  “Didn’t we.”

  “I meant that if we ever really—”

  “‘If’? ‘Really’? Cyprian, I can smell what happened.”

  SUMMONED TO VENICE AT LAST, Cyprian, with time on the train to think, kept reminding himself that it had not, after all, been the sort of thing one ought to be taking too romantically, indeed how fatal a mistake it would be to do so. As it turned out, however, this was too much to expect of Derrick Theign, who, ordinarily a bit more taciturn, now flew without warning into high-tessitura dismay, the moment Cyprian arrived at the pensione in Santa Croce loudly ejecting what would soon amount to gallons of mucus and saliva, smearing and setting askew his spectacles, chucking about household objects, some of them fragile and even expensive, destroying items of Murano glass, slamming doors, windows, shutters, briefcases, pot-lids, whatever was slammable and handy. Later in the day, as if having in all this percussion belatedly heard its cue, the bora arrived, bringing from every dismal pocket of ill-fortune and mental distress upwind of here its imperatives of mortal flaccidity and blue surrender. The neighbors, who didn’t usually complain, being not above a spot of drama themselves from time to time, did complain now, and some quite aggrievedly, too. The wind racketed through every loose tile and unsecured shutter.

  “A sweetheart. A bloody sweetheart for God’s sake, I could vomit. I shall vomit. Haven’t you a cherished photograph of the beloved, which I might perhaps vomit on? Have you any idea of how sodding completely you have just destroyed years of work, you ignorant, fat, ill-dressed—”

  “One way to look at it, of course, Derrick, but objectively one can’t say she’s really a ‘sweetheart’—”

  “Nance! Pouffe! Sod!”

  Yet Theign, for all his apparent loss of impulse-control, was careful to refrain from bodily violence, which Cyprian in any case now, curiously, found himself not as eager for as he once might have been.

  Signor Giambolognese from downstairs had his head in the door. “Ma signori, um po’ di moderazione, per piacere. . . .”

  “Moderation! You’re Italian! What do you people bloody know about moderation?”

  Later, when Theign was calmer, or maybe only too tired to scream, the discussion resumed. “‘Help her.’ You’ve the sheer sodomitical side to ask that of me.”

  “Strictly a business arrangement, of course.”

  “That might take some thought.” Theign threw his eyebrows into engagement, usually not a hopeful sign. “What can you pay me with? What perverse coin? The bloom’s been off your rosebud for quite some time—if I still wanted it, which I’m not at all sure I do, why, I’d just take it, wouldn’t I. The price of rescuing your maiden from these Austrian beasts one would think you’d have learned something about by now might be higher than you want to pay—it could even mean being sent someplace that would make the Gobi seem like Earl’s Court on a Bank Holiday—oh yes we’ve rooms full of files on all these mapless horrors—which chiefly exist, in fact, to send you miserable lot out into, in the sure and certain hope we’ll never have to set eyes on you again. Are you quite resolved that’s what you want? What do you imagine you’d be ‘saving’ her for anyway? beyond the next willy down the queue, or willies, Turkish more than likely, she’d welcome the change in size I’m sure.”

  “Derrick. You want me to assault you.”

  “How intuitive. Enough to know better than to try, one hopes.”

  “Well. If this isn’t just as manly as it gets.”

  When Foley Walker returned from Göttingen, he and Scarsdale Vibe met at an outdoor restaurant in the foothills of the Dolomites near a river in clamorous descent, the surroundings filled with an innocent light reflected not from Alpine snows but from man-made structures of some antiquity.

  Scarsdale and Foley had agreed to delude themselves that in this sun-spattered atrium they had found temporary refuge from the murderous fields of capitalist endeavor, no artifact within miles of here younger than a thousand years, marble hands in flowing gestures conversing among themselves as if having only just emerged from their realm of calcium gravity into this trellised repose. . . . The table between them offering fontina, risotto with white truffles, veal and mushroom stew . . . bottles of Prosecco waiting in beds of chipped ice packed down from the Alps. Girls in striped headscarves and flowing skirts hovered thoughtfully just offstage. Other customers had been discreetly seated out of earshot.

  “All humming along in Germany, I take it.”

  “The Traverse kid did a skip.”

  Scarsdale stared at a truffle as if he were about to chastise it. “Where to?”

  “Still looking into that.”

  “Nobody disappears unless he knows something. What does he know, Foley?”

  “Likely that you paid to have his Pappy put out of the way.”

  “Of course, but what happened to ‘we,’ Foley? You are still the ‘other’ Scarsdale Vibe, are you not?”

  “I must’ve meant that technically it was your money.”

  “You are a full partner, Foley. You see the same set of books I do. The mixing of funds is a mystery deep as death, and if you like we can observe a minute of silence to contemplate that, but don’t be disingenuous with me.”

  Foley took out a huge jackknife, opened it and began to pick his teeth, Arkansas style, as he had learned to in the war.

  “How long do you think he’s known?” Scarsdale kept on.

  “Well . . .” Foley preten
ded to think about it and finally shrugged. “Would that matter?”

  “If he took our money, all the time knowing what he knew?”

  “You mean he’d owe us the money?”

  “Did he catch sight of you when you were there, at Göttingen?”

  “Mmmnh . . . I’m not sure.”

  “Damn, Foley.” Serving-girls withdrew into the pale archways, solemnly waiting for a better moment to approach.

  “What?”

  “He saw you—he knows we’re onto him.”

  “By now he’s likely slipped into the depths, wherever lost souls go, so what’s it matter?”

  “Your personal guarantee. Could I have it in writing?”

  UP HERE IN NORTH ITALY, as in France one might buy ordinary village wine hoping to find a few cases of overrun from a great vineyard nearby, Vibe’s theory was to buy all the school-of-Squarciones he could put his hands on in the hopes that someplace in there might be an unattributed Mantegna somebody had overlooked. It was the current fashion to disrespect the painting skills of the famed Paduan collector and impresario himself, so any actual Squarciones kicking around, including embroideries and tapestries (for he had begun his working life as a tailor), would be going for a song. In fact, Scarsdale had already picked up a minor angel just by singing “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away” to a sacristan who might have been insane. Well, actually, he had Foley sing it. “But I can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” Foley pointed out, “and I don’t know the words.”

  “Candlelight, sycamores, you’ll pick it up.”

  Scarsdale had never been reluctant to hand out tasks to Foley that were embarrassing at best and often competitive with some of Foley’s old Civil War nightmares. Though they betrayed some mysterious flaw in the industrialist’s self-regard which someday could prove worrisome, these exercises in personal tyranny happened on average no more than once or twice a year, and Foley had been able so far to live with them. But on this European excursion, the humiliation rate seemed to have picked up a notch—in fact not a day went by that Foley didn’t find himself carrying out some chore better left to a performing monkey, and it was beginning to irritate him some.