Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  YASHMEEN WAS IN VIENNA, working in a dress shop in Mariahilf which had been gathering some celebrity for designs not yet quite discovered by the midinettes of Paris and so not yet dispersed into the greater market of the World. One day as she was writing up a request for overdue payment, she became aware of a fragrant presence close by.

  “Oh! I didn’t hear you—”

  “Hullo, Pinky.” Uttered in a note so low and somehow austere that Yashmeen did not immediately recognize her old Girton schoolmate Noellyn Fanshawe, grown less æthereal than the scholarly beauty of old, still hatless, her hair now drastically cropped, brushed back from her face, every bit of the charming little skull it had once been such delightful play to go searching for among all those blonde curls now brutally available, unequivocal as a blow or a gunshot. Her eyes, accordingly, enormous and somehow smudged away from the declarative light of the shopgirl’s day in which it was Yashmeen’s current fate to dwell.

  “Noellyn! I had no idea you were in town.”

  “Here on a whim.”

  “You came in so quietly . . . ?”

  “It’s this Silent Frock I imagine.”

  “You know we’re even stocking them here now—it’s quite caught on.”

  “And you re-calibrate them as well, I’m told.”

  “Is it this one you’re wearing?” Yashmeen cupped her hand behind one ear and leaned toward the dress. “Twirl about.” The girl complied. “Can’t hear a thing.”

  “It’s daytime. Traffic. But at night, when I particularly need it, it’s been acting up.”

  “I’ll just fetch the Facharbeiter.” She took a flexible brass-and-ebonite speaking-tube from its cradle. “Gabika, come out here.”

  Noellyn allowed herself a brief grin. “I’ve stopped saying ‘please’ to them, too.”

  “You’ll see.”

  The technician who presented himself from the back room was young and slender, with very long eyelashes. “A house-pet,” Noellyn said. “I wish I were interested enough, I’d borrow him for the evening.”

  “Let’s go back to the fitting-salon. Gabika, we shall need this immediately.”

  “He reminds me a bit of Cyprian Latewood. Did you ever see that old vegetable again, by the way?”

  But Yashmeen felt somehow willing to share only the most general sort of news. She had grown, she supposed, overcautious, yet the possibility remained that Noellyn was here at the behest of the T.W.I.T. Or someone even more determined.

  Yashmeen helped her friend out of the ingenious garment, which Gabika bore away respectfully to his work-table. She poured them coffee from an elaborate urn, and they sat a moment appraising one another. “I can’t get used to that boy’s crop on you. Lovely as it is.”

  “I had no choice. You don’t know her, we met last year in London, before I knew it, there I was all bewitched. She took me late one night to a hair-dresser’s in Maida Vale, I didn’t notice the little straps and buckles on the chair till too late, and in less than a minute they had me quite sorted out. There were all these horrible machines in the place, and at first I thought I was in for one of those new ‘permanent wave’ things, but my friend had a different idea. ‘You are to be my captive boy for a while, perhaps I shall let you grow it back in, depending how quickly I grow bored with the look.’ The woman with the shears was charming but merciless, quite took her time about it, while my friend sat there with her skirts up, tossing herself off shamelessly through the whole thing. After a while I wished for the freedom of my hands so I could do the same.”

  “But she didn’t let you.”

  “And I did beg ever so sweetly.”

  “Poor Noellyn.” She took the other girl’s chin lightly between thumb and finger. “Cross those pretty wrists behind your back for just a moment, there’s a good girl.”

  “Oh but Yashmeen, I didn’t come here to—”

  “Do it.”

  “Yes, Yashmeen.”

  Gabika returned with the recalibrated Silent Frock to find them flushed and murmuring, with their clothing in some disarray and a decided musk note in the room, mingling with the background atmosphere of brewing coffee. He was used to these tableaux by now, had in fact quite come to look forward to them, perhaps explaining why he’d been on the job now for nearly two years without asking for a raise in salary.

  Finding that perhaps against expectation they were actually delighted to see one another again, the two young women passed a pleasant evening together, going to early dinner at Hopfner’s and then returning to Yashmeen’s rooms in Mariahilf. By the time it had occurred to either to look out the window, it was, or should have been, well after dark. “What time is it, Yashmeen, it can’t be this early still.”

  “Perhaps time has slowed down, as they say in Zürich. This watch reads eleven.”

  “But look at the sky.” It was certainly odd. The stars had not appeared, the sky was queerly luminescent, with the occluded light of a stormy day.

  IT WENT ON for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

  Toward the end of October, all hell broke loose over the Austrian announcement that they were intending to annex Bosnia. Theign looked in, more haggard than usual.

  “We need someone on the spot,” he told Cyprian. “We may have to pull some people out.”

  “And you thought of me straightaway.”

  “Not my first choice, but there’s really no one else. You can have young Moistleigh along if you feel you need a bodyguard.”

  Bevis was happy enough to be out of the subterranean funk of his crypto facility. “Yes do me good to get out of the old coconut-shy for a bit.”

  There was an open bottle of šljivovica on Theign’s desk, but he didn’t offer either of them any.

  “What’s this?” Cyprian said.

  “Map of Austria-Hungary.”

  “Oh. Do I get a magnifying lens with it?”

  “What’s the scale here?” muttered Bevis.

  Theign squinted at the legend. “Seems to be one to fifty million, if I’ve counted the naughts correctly.”

  “A bit too naughty for me,” Cyprian muttered.

  “Not at all, perfect for the traveler, last thing one would want I’d imagine, to be out in the open somewhere struggling in a fierce mountain wind with some gigantic volume of mile-to-the-inch sheets.”

  “But this thing is too small to be of any use to anyone. It’s a toy.”

  “Well. I mean it’s good enough for the F.O., isn’t it. This happens to be the very map they use. Decisions of the utmost gravity, fates of empires including our own, all on the basis of this edition before you, Major B. F. Vumb, Royal Engineers, 1901.”

  “It would certainly explain a good deal about the F.O.,” Cyprian staring at the map bleakly. “Look at Vienna and Sarajevo, they’re not even half an inch apart, there isn’t even room here to spell out their names, all it says is ‘V’ and ‘S.’”

  “Exactly. Puts the whole thing literally in a different perspective, doesn’t it . . . almost godlike as you’d say.”

  The tone of voice, the expression on Theign’s face, made Bevis anxious.

  “Usual Theign,” Cyprian assured him later.

  “No, no, he doesn’t care, can’t you see that, none of the details matter to him, not only the map, he knows we won’t live long enough to use it. . . .”

  YASHMEEN ARRIVED ONE MORNING at the shop in the Mariahilfe Straße to find the door locked, in fact chained shut, a municipal notice of co
nfiscation plastered across those windows that weren’t broken. Back at her flat, the landlady, whose eyes would not meet hers, asked for her identity papers, claiming not to know who she was.

  “Frau Keuler, what’s going on?”

  “I do not know how you have obtained the keys to this flat, but you will give them to me now.”

  “I got these from you—we see each other every day, I’ve always paid the rent on time, please, what’s wrong?”

  “If those are your belongings, I want you to pack them and be out of here as soon as possible.”

  “But—”

  “Must I call the police? Judensau. You are all alike.”

  Jewish pig? For a minute she was too bewildered to see it. Vienna had been anti-Semitic forever, of course, from end to end, the inner city, the Ring, the Vienna Woods for that matter, even, since 1897, officially so, under the party of “Christian Socialists” headed by Jew-hating perennial Burgomeister Dr. Karl Lueger. In the national elections last year, the party had also tripled its membership in the Reichsrath. She had had no reason to pay attention till now—it was the air people breathed in this place, reaching a level of abstraction where actual blood was no longer the point. “Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich,” as der schöne Karl liked to say—“Who is a Jew, I determine.” Hatred of the Jew was sometimes almost beside the point. Modern anti-Semitism really went far beyond feelings, had become a source of energy, tremendous dark energy that could be tapped in to like an electric main for specific purposes, a way to a political career, a factor in parliamentary bargaining over budgets, taxes, armaments, any issue at all, a weapon for prevailing over a business rival in a deal. Or in Yashmeen’s case a simple method of chasing somebody out of town.

  Cyprian didn’t take it quite so casually. “Well. It’s dangerous here for you now. Has been for a while actually. Dangerous people in power.”

  “Who? Not that kind old gentleman.”

  “Not Habsburgs, exactly. Prussophiles, I suppose is what I mean. Lovers of might. They want to preside over the end of the world. But now you really must come to Trieste.”

  She laughed. “Appropriate. Here they call it a Jewish city.”

  “Oh in Vienna,” Cyprian replied, “they think Shanghai is a Jewish city.”

  “Well, actually . . .” she began.

  THE ANNEXATION CRISIS had everybody in motion, and even Ratty McHugh, his life like everyone else’s these days run more and more by train schedules, was dislodged from Vienna far enough to meet Cyprian in Graz, in the garden of the Elefant Hotel.

  “Sorry there’s only so much I can do at the moment, this Bosnian pickle and so forth.”

  “Theign making trouble at your shop as well, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  They were both smoking, and the resulting haze between them produced somehow an impression of sympathy each was ready to accept without misgivings. “There are those among my shopmates,” Ratty admitted, “who’d as soon see him in a different line of work. Far too matey with the Ballhausplatz, for one thing. Well, common Anglo-Habsburg interests, foremost being Macedonia, one keeps telling oneself, by now a bit wistfully. But he’s got resources, he’s dangerous, and it’s even money at this point whether or not he can be contained.”

  “One couldn’t just have him shot, I suppose.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Only lighthearted banter, Ratty. Not easy for you, I quite appreciate, these never-ending crises.”

  They had left the garden and were strolling across the bridge toward the Murgasse, where there was an automatic restaurant.

  “The Balkan Peninsula is the boardinghouse dining-room of Europe,” Ratty grumbled, “dangerously crowded, eternally hungry, toxic with mutual antagonism. A paradise for arms dealers, and the despair of bureaucrats. I wish I were on the Chinese desk. But you’re itching to be filled in, I can see that.

  “Well. Turkey has been in Bosnia for nearly five hundred years. It is a Mahommedan country, in fact a Turkish province. It was a staging area for the Turks on their way to the Siege of Vienna, and of course Vienna never forgot that. Thirty years ago Austria finally had its revenge. The infamous Article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin took Bosnia away from Turkey and put it under Austrian ‘protection.’ As well as allowing Austrian troops to garrison Novi Pazar, which had been the furthest thrust of Turkey west and northward into Europe. The understanding was that one day Austria would leave, and Turkey would re-establish herself, though neither régime was ever in much hurry for this. All seemed secure. But suddenly in Constantinople here came the Young Turks with their revolution, and who knew? they might wish to see the agreement actually honored! So Franz Josef, at the urging of the vile Aerenthal, pre-emptively issues his rescript ‘annexing’ Bosnia to the Dual Monarchy. Serbia is unlikely to let that sort of thing pass, and Russia must support Serbia, just as Germany must honor its promises to Austria, and so on, and so on, in three-quarter time, into a general European war.”

  “But,” Cyprian blinking politely, “can they really be that obtuse in Vienna? I had always found them so up-to-the-minute, don’t you know, clear-headed, rather a, well, a grasp on things.”

  “Oh dear.” Ratty gazed at Cyprian in some concern. “It certainly seems as if both the Emperor and the Sultan were recognizing in Russia a common enemy. Neither gentleman talks to me, so how would I know. Austria have agreed to pay reparations to Turkey for taking away Bosnia—and further, quite unaccountably, to withdraw their troops from Novi Pazar, thus effectively handing it back to the Turks and giving up their own long-cherished dream of a railroad link from Sarajevo to Mitrovitsa, and thus to the Ægean Sea. But whatever that ‘really’ means, some Austrian idea of a sop or whatever, they have still annexed Bosnia. That fatal act, and the steps Germany has taken in its support, mark the end of things as they were. Isvolsky and Grey want a conference. The Dardanelles have come into play, and we must assume Bulgaria as well. . . . The Treaty of Berlin is perhaps not dead, but alive only conditionally, clearly a sort of zombie, stalking the corridors of Europe doing its masters’ bidding. Wagers, many of them substantial, are being booked throughout the diplomatic community. There are European Apocalypse Pools among the workers at the bureaux concerned, as to the date of a general mobilization. This year, next year, soon. It is now inescapably on its way.”

  Ratty was watching him now with almost a pleading expression, like a convert to some outer domain of faith who is not sure his friends will understand. “They never tell you, really. How could they—Professor Renfrew might have entertained suspicions. In theory. Passed on what he thought he knew. But once we’re out here, Cyps, well in the soup—one must find one’s own way through—or not, as the case may be. It’s like having the lights brought up for a bit, long enough to see how fearfully much is in play . . . the dimensions of possibility out here. . . .”

  Cyprian narrowed his eyes. “Ratty?”

  “I’ve heard where they’re sending you, and what your orders are. I would intervene, if I could.”

  Cyprian shrugged. “Of course I’m a crucially important fellow, but my real concern is who’ll look after Yashmeen. Her friends, as nearly as I can tell, are not her friends. I rather wondered if one of your lot—”

  “Of course. But, Cyps, you, out there—it’s going to be dangerous.” Ratty was in full gaze now, a gaze full of rain in the quadrangles, pipe-smoking along the river, dawns inflecting the roof slates out the window, pints and bottles, horse races won and lost, moments of splendid understanding, nearly in reach, withdrawn across the night.

  “It’s dangerous here. Look at these people,” flicking his gloved hand at the array of Austrian townsfolk visible at the moment. Frowning, shaking his head. “Or was it something in particular.”

  “Theign, I suppose.”

  “Yes. Care in motion, as the horoscopes always say. I thought actually that I might bring Yashmeen to Trieste.”

  “We’ve one or two very good people there. And there’s your own op, the neo-Uskok chap, Vlado Clissa
n, as well.”

  “We’ve already been in contact. Vlado can be counted on.”

  “He does hate Theign.”

  “The very phrase I was groping for.”

  Ratty put his hand briefly on Cyprian’s sleeve. “I always gave you more trouble than I ought, whenever her name came up. I hope you understand it was only a youthful idea of ragging.”

  Tilting his head, “And my youthful ideas about being in love. I don’t imagine that I am now, Ratty, but I do need to be sure she’s safe. I know what a nuisance you must think me—it isn’t what you lot are really about—and I am grateful.”