Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  The Doosra’s discovery of the Mark IV Maxim gun, as Lieutenant-Colonel Halfcourt duly wired Whitehall (in clear, much to its annoyance), was “hardly among the more promising developments vis-à-vis Pan-Turanian hopes.” Remote lamaseries, caravans on the move, telegraph stations at significant wells, began to fall before the implacable shock-wave of a revelation which few to date, if any, had shared, and many simply blamed on the Doosra’s known enthusiasms for opium, ganja, and any number of local fusel oils, singly or combined, named and nameless. The interests of England, Russia, Japan, and China out here, not to mention those of Germany and Islam, were already, for many, woven too intricately to keep track of. Now with yet another player joining the Great Game—All-Turkic, for pity’s sake—the level of complication, for many of the old Inner Asia hands, grew far too harrowing, mental damage within Colonel Prokladka’s shop being perhaps the most spectacular, with its midnight explosions, mysterious cases of hallucination, actual invisibility, and unannounced howling exits out through mud archways and into the wind-ruled wastes forever.

  “They think they go to join some sacred band,” Chingiz, the Colonel’s denshchik, confided to Mushtaq at one of their daily get-togethers in the marketplace. “What they cannot see yet is that he is not another Madali or even Namaz, this is not another holy war, he does not seek an army to follow him, he despises people, all people, sends away all who would be disciples, that is both his fascination and the force of his destiny. What is to come will not occur in ordinary space. The Europeans will find great difficulty in drawing maps of this.”

  “Rejected disciples have too often become dangerous.”

  “It is but one of many ways he invites his dissolution. He gives loaded revolvers as personal gifts. Publicly humiliates those who profess to love him most deeply. Comes drunk into the mosque during prayers and behaves most sinfully. None of it matters, for in any case he is but a precursor, who sometime must give way to the True One. How he does this is not as important as the timing.”

  “You visit the shaman often, Chingiz?”

  “He is thy shaman too, Mushtaq.”

  “Alas, I am too old for these adventures.”

  “Mushtaq, you’re thirty. Besides, he keeps a supply of wild mushrooms, sought at his behest by prospectors who are guided by their guardian spirits, in parts of Siberia not even the Germans know about. It would do thee far more good than the poisonous nutmeat of the south.”

  “That of course would be a different matter.”

  ONE DAY THE NOTED UYGHUR troublemaker Al Mar-Fuad showed up in English hunting tweeds and a deerstalker cap turned sidewise, with a sort of ultimatum in which one might just detect that difficulty with the prevocalic r typical of the British upper class. “Gweetings, gentlemen, on this Glowious Twelfth!”

  “By God he’s right Mushtaq, we’ve lost track of the time again. Bit oddly turned out, wouldn’t you say, for a tribal chieftain in these parts?”

  “I am here to deliver a message fwom my master, the Dooswa,” declared the Uyghur fiercely, flourishing an ancient Greening shotgun whose brasswork carried holy inscriptions in Arabic. “Then I am going out after some gwouse.”

  “Fond of the English, are you sir.”

  “I love Gweat Bwitain! Lord Salisbuwy is my wole model!”

  This is the only place on earth, Auberon Halfcourt reflected, where lethargy of the soul can arrive in spasms. Summoning up what he hoped was a pleased smile, “On behalf of H.M. Government, we declare ourselves at your service, sir.”

  “Weally? You mean it?”

  “Anything in our power.”

  “Then you must suwwender the city to the Dooswa.”

  “Ehrm—that is, I’m not sure it’s mine to surrender, is the thing, you see. . . .”

  “Come, come, you can’t fool an old camel-twader.”

  “Have you spoken to any of the Russians yet? the Chinese?”

  “The Chinese are no pwoblem. My Pwinciple’s intewests lie quite in the other diwection.”

  Perhaps because he had been eavesdropping, Colonel Prokladka showed up about then. A glance, controllable by neither, pulsed between him and the Uyghur. “Wwetched son of a camel-dwiver,” Al Mar-Fuad was heard to whisper as he rode out of town.

  “I SHALL NEVER understand them,” Halfcourt plaintively confessed to Prokladka. “Their strangeness—in language, faith, history—the family interweavings alone—they can turn invisible at will, simply by withdrawing into that limitless terrain of queerness, mapless as the Himalaya or the Tian Shan. The future out here simply belongs to the Prophet. It might have gone differently. This madman in the Taklamakan might actually have founded his pan-shamanic empire. The Japanese, let us say at German solicitation, might have attended in greater numbers, so as to draw off the odd Russian division in the event of a European war. We should have the bazaars full of yakitori pitches and geishas in bamboo cages. I’ve been out here twenty-five years, ever since old Cavi ate the sausage at Kabul, and all the meddling of the Powers has only made a convergence to the Mahommedan that much more certain.”

  “We are neither of us mountain fighters,” Prokladka brimming with collegial tears, “Russians prefer steppes, as your people prefer Low Countries, or better yet oceans, to fight in.”

  “We could share what we know,” offered Halfcourt, with seemingly emotional abruptness.

  The Polkovnik gazed back, pop-eyed and bloodshot, as if actually considering this, before giving in to a laughter pitched so high and so uncertain in its dynamics as to bring into doubt his ability to control it. “Polny pizdets,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  Halfcourt reached to pat his arm. “There there, Yevgeny Alexandrovitch, it’s all right, I was ragging you of course, inscrutable British sense of humor sort of lapse, and I do apologize—”

  “Oh, Halfcourt, these profitless wastes . . .”

  “Do I not dream, with little respite, of Simla, and Peliti’s veranda at the height of the season? And the wanton eyes of those who pass, it seems endlessly without me, over the Combermere Bridge?”

  BEYOND KASHGAR, the Silk Road split into northern and southern branches, so as to avoid the vast desert immediately to the east of the city, the Taklamakan, which in Chinese was said to translate as “Go In and You Don’t Come Out,” though in Uyghur it was supposed to mean “Home Country of the Past.”

  “Well. It’s the same thing, isn’t it, sir?”

  “Go into the past and never come out?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are you talking your rubbish again, Mushtaq? what of the reverse? Remain in the exile of the present tense and never get back in, to reclaim what was?”

  Mushtaq shrugged. “When one has heard enough of these complaints, lamentable though they may be . . .”

  “Apologies, you are right of course Mushtaq. The choice was made too long ago, too deep in that no-longer-accessible homeland, to matter now whether I chose, or others chose for me, and who can draw boundaries between the remembrancer and the remembered?”

  His argument here could not be termed altogether ingenuous, there having been at least, notably, one Remembered whose contours had remained for him all too defined. “All too damnably clear.” Unable not to whisper this aloud, later, when Mushtaq had returned to sleep and Halfcourt had lit up another transnoctial cheroot, unwilling to forgo the flaccid swoon of yielding to memory . . . her form, already womanly, held at wary attention that ill-omened day among the negotiable flesh, hair covered and mouth veiled, eyes belonging entirely to herself, though they were to find him, unerring as an Afghani sharpshooter, the moment he rode in under the gate of sun-baked mud, he and Mushtaq, disguised as Punjabi traders, pretending to be in the market for some of the highly esteemed donkeys of the Waziri. He knew full well what this was, this gathering of girls, he was an old trouper by then at the costume theatricals they were forever at out here, and watched the other visitors who came by, the sweat and saliva and where it flowed, and where it flew. His intent towa
rd the child, he would protest, had never been to dishonor but to rescue. Rescue, however, had many names, and the rope up which a maiden climbed to safety might then be used to bind her most cruelly. In that instant he had become, awkwardly, two creatures resident within the same life—one conveyed without qualification into the haunted spaces of desire, the other walled in by work-demands in which desire was never better than annoying and too often debilitating—the two selves sharing thenceforth this miserable psychic leasehold, co-conscious, each at once respectful and contemptuous of the other’s imperatives.

  Colleagues he knew of it happening to had struggled, grown insomniac and worn, cultivating destructive habits, inflicting on themselves wounds ranging from minor to mortal. Auberon Halfcourt saw the danger and at first, day to day, somehow kept avoiding it, though with scant assistance from Mushtaq, who, the instant Yashmeen arrived, discovered the advantages of absence. “I have been barefoot over these particular coals more than once, Your Aggravation, expect nothing, my cousin Sharma will take over the laundry, the cigar merchant is anxious for his last two payments, I believe that is all, ta-ta, until our reunion in less vexatious times,” and he had simply vanished, in so brief a twinkling that Halfcourt suspected some exercise of local magic.

  Intentionally or not, this posed the question, from the time she stepped across his doorsill, no longer of whether but of when Yashmeen must go. Her pale eyes from time to time narrowing in conjecture he would never learn to read, her naked limbs flickering against the green-shadowed tiles of the baths and fountains, her silences often sweet as heard singing, her odors, fugitive, various, a soon-inseparable part of the interior climate, borne from any corner of the wind-rose, somehow overcoming even cigar-smoke, her hair compared by one of the local balladeers to those mystical waterfalls that hide the Hidden Worlds of the Tibetan lamas. Previous to Yashmeen, of course—which made it especially awkward now—he had never been so much as fascinated, let alone enamored. One did not, however much in widely-known fact some did, undergo such passionate attachment to a child. One suffered, was ruined, raved intoxicated through the market spaces, abasing oneself before the wog’s contempt, seeking at length the consolations of the Browning, the rafter, the long hike into the desert with an empty canteen. Self-slaughter, as Hamlet always says, was certainly in the cards, unless one had been out here long enough to have contemplated the will of God, observed the stochastic whimsy of the day, learned when and when not to whisper “Insh’allah,” and understood how, as one perhaps might never have in England, to await, to depend upon, the ineluctable departure of what was most dear.

  Colonel Prokladka and his shopmates, for whom there were no secrets in Kashgar, at least no secular ones, looked on in sorrowful amusement. Had there been a way to turn it to political use, they would of course have undertaken some program of mischief—but as if the girl had somehow charmed even that iniquitous fraternity, none ventured beyond a rough courtliness that sometimes could even be mistaken for good manners. There was an Anglo-Russian Entente, after all. Yashmeen visited regularly with the girls of the Polkovnik’s harem, and everyone male in the vicinity had the sense not to interfere, though a subaltern or two had been reported for unauthorized peeping.

  As always they were more preoccupied with ways to turn a dishonest ruble—hasheesh, real estate, or their colleague Volodya’s latest scheme, insane even by the standards prevailing here, to steal the great jade monolith at the Guri Amir mausoleum in Samarkand, either by breaking it up into smaller blocks or by engaging the semi-mythical aeronaut Padzhitnoff to spirit away the whole chunk using some technology as yet undeveloped in the world at large. Volodya was obsessed by jade, the way others are by gold, diamonds, hasheesh. It was he who kept slyly reminding Auberon Halfcourt that out here the local word for jade is yashm. He had been sent east in 1895 for his part in an illicit jade deal at the time of the construction of Alexander III’s tomb. Now, at Kashgar, he wasted everyone’s time planning to raid the tomb of Tamerlane, despite a long-standing and universally believed-in curse that would release upon the world, in the event of such desecration, calamities not even the great Mongol conqueror had thought of.

  LIEUTENANT DWIGHT PRANCE had shown up one night unannounced, like a sandstorm. Halfcourt remembered him from when he first came out here, a scholar of geography and languages at Cambridge, one of Professor Renfrew’s. Well-meaning, went without saying, none of them knew how not to be. Now he could scarcely be recognized—the man was filthy, sun-beaten, got up in some tattered wreck of a turnout intended, he supposed, to be read as Chinese.

  “I gather that something’s afoot to the east of here . . . ?”

  The distracted operative, with one of Halfcourt’s Craven A’s already burning, lit another, then forgot to smoke it as well. “Yes and how far ‘east’ being almost beside the point, when one has been engaged for the past—my God! it’s been a year . . . more than a year. . . .”

  “Some . . . Chinese involvement,” prompted Halfcourt.

  “Oh, as if boundary-lines mattered anymore . . . if only . . . no, we’re well past that—now we must think of the entire north Eurasian land-mass, from Manchuria to Buda-Pesth, all, in the eyes of those we must eventually face, territory unredeemed—all the object of a single merciless dream.”

  “I say, Eurasia Irredenta,” Halfcourt beaming through the smoke of his cigar, as if pleased with the coinage. “Well.”

  “They prefer ‘Turania.’”

  “Oh, that!” Waving the cigar, almost one would say dismissively.

  “Known to your shop, is it.”

  “What, old Pan-Turania? Japanese mischief,” as if identifying some item of porcelain.

  “Yes. The usual Turkish and German meddling as well. . . . But for this performance, the familiar Powers have been cast in subordinate roles, removed into the shadows at the margins of the stage . . . while up in the glare, poised between the worlds, stands a visitor—say, a famous touring actor from far away, who will perform not in English but in a strange tongue unknown to his audience, yet who for all that keeps each of them transfixed, mesmerized, unable to remove his gaze even to glance sidewise at his neighbor.”

  “So that none of them can . . . quite think straight?”

  “So that by the end of the piece, sir, each, imprisoned in his own fear, is praying that it all be only theater.”

  Halfcourt was giving him a long appraising stare. Finally, “Has this Asiatic Beerbohm Tree of yours got a name?”

  “Not yet . . . the general feeling out there is that by the time his name is revealed, all will be so irreversibly on the move that, for any step we might conceive, here or in Whitehall, it will be far too late.”

  ONE EVENING shortly after his arrival, Kit was sitting out in the courtyard with the Lieutenant-Colonel. Each had by him a traditional twilight arrack-and-soda. Pastry vendors called from the street. Invisible birds, collecting against the night, sang boisterously. Across the way came the smell of somebody cooking cabbages and onions. The evening call to prayer broke over the city like a victim’s cry.

  “We are each in some relationship,” Halfcourt was saying, “largely undiscussed, with the same young woman. I cannot speak as to another’s feelings, but one’s own are so . . . automatically suspect really, that one hesitates to admit them, even to one’s counterpart in hopelessness.”

  “Well, you have my silence,” said Kit, “for what that’s worth.”

  “I imagine—how shall I refrain from imagining?—that she is grown by now quite beautiful.”

  “She is a peach, sir.”

  They sat among the choiring clepsydras of the evening garden, time elapsing in a dozen ways, allowing their cigars to go out, keeping a companionable silence.

  At last Kit felt he could venture, “Pretty forlorn lookout for me. I don’t know that I’d’ve come all the way out here if she hadn’t set it up, so you can guess how easy I can be made a sap of.”

  A lucifer flared. “At least you’ve a likelihood of seein
g her again?”

  “No chance you’ll get back there anytime soon?”

  “My postings are not of my own choice, I’m afraid.” He squinted at Kit for a while, as if trying to read a contractual clause. Then, nodding briefly, “She must have asked you to look after me. . . .”

  “No offense, sir . . . I can guarantee that Yashmeen has you very much on her mind, in, in her heart, I’d say. . . .” Some articulation of smoke across the twilight advised him of how little further he could take this.

  Auberon Halfcourt was by now too annoyed to be feeling much pity for this boy. Young Mr. Traverse clearly had no idea of what to do with himself. Thought he was out on a nature hike. Years before taking flannel, Halfcourt, his secret commission in a tin box in the safe of a P&O steamer, sailed out into the preternaturally blue Med, in a deck chair with his assumed name stenciled onto it, through the Suez Canal, pausing midway to take a dip in the Great Bitter Lake, proceeding then across the Red and Arabian seas to Karachi. There at Kiamari he boarded the Northwestern Railway, which was to carry him by causeway over to the salt delta of the Indus, on through radiant clouds of ibis and flamingo, mangrove giving way to acacias and poplars, into the plains of Sind, up along the river clamoring down from the mountains, toward the frontier, switching to narrow-gauge at Nowshera, on to Durghal station and the Malakand Pass where raptors soared, into native disguise and eastward through the mountains, shot at and formally cursed, over the great Karakoram Pass at last, into East Turkestan and the high road to Kashgar. Nowadays, of course, it might as well all be on a Cook’s tour.