“In quieter times—”
“We wouldn’t have the Blutwurst Special,” nodding at a plate behind the pure lead-glass and chrome-steel compartments of the Automatik. “An obvious response to deep crisis.”
“Hmnh. Always been more of a toad-in-the-hole man myself.”
LEAVING THE SÜDBAHN, she gazed backward at iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete ensemble of “free choices” that define the course of a human life. A new switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be.
Stations one by one entered the past. The Semmering tunnel, the Mur Valley, ruined castles, the sudden traveling company of hydropathic addicts, the beastly shades of resort fashion, the inevitability of Graz. Then due south across the Slavonian plain, and up into the hills again, and the tunnels there, and Ljubljana, and across the moorland, up into the Karst, first glimpse of the sea, down at last through Općina to the South Station in Trieste. Eleven and a half hours express, a journey between worlds.
Cyprian had arranged for her to stay at a pensione in the Old City, back behind the Piazza Grande. It was close enough to the Piazza Cavana for her to be mistaken now and then for one of the nightwalking ladies who worked in the area. Soon she had become close friends with some of these industrious fireflies. Cyprian observed a neuropathic level of caution going to and from their meetings. Theign himself had largely abandoned Venice for Vienna these days, but certain of his creatures were sure to be about.
AND AS FOR ANY ASSISTANCE from Theign’s shop with her predicament, Yashmeen would not, after all, be able to count on much. “No, no Latewood my dear chap it won’t do,” choosing a moment close enough to Cyprian’s departure for the Balkans not to mask the clarity of the insult, Theign’s drawl growing more insufferable as he proceeded, “you see. Yes your little friend it seems is a person of interest to the Okhrana, and just at this moment it is the Okhrana toward whom most particularly one must endeavor to show consideration, with the Anglo-Russian understanding still so new, so fearfully sensitive, we must all support F.O. in this, set aside our unimportant little personal dreams and wishes mustn’t we.”
It did not take Cyprian altogether by surprise. “We had an agreement,” he pointed out calmly enough, “and you might as well be an Austrian double, you contemptible pile of shit.” Theign launched one of his virile slaps, Cyprian dodged out of the way—rather than be defied, Theign chose to look ridiculous pursuing Cyprian through the rooms and presently into the street screaming threats of bodily insult, but Cyprian was determined today not to be struck, and at length Theign gave up the chase. It was not a valid use of his time.
“I suppose,” Theign called at last, “you want to be released from your part of the agreement.”
“No.” Wanting of course to abandon the whole corrupted project, which was sure now to be more dangerous than he knew how to measure or anticipate. He must go on with it—but God help him, why? Discussing it later in Vienna with Max Khäutsch, Theign too would find himself unable to keep from shrugging in contempt, a repeating bodily tic, out of his control—“The boy always was a fool. Either he knows what’s waiting for him out there or he hasn’t a clue, and in either event he’s going through with it.”
“Perhaps,” Khäutsch would speculate in the peculiar whisper he reserved for shop talk, “he is tired, and wishes for an end. Cannot quite manage it himself, wants us to do it for him.”
Cyprian and Theign had remained poised at opposite ends of the Venice flat. “Suit yourself!” shrieked Theign at last, off without further formalities for the train that would again take him to Vienna, where lately, it was an open secret, he had been spending more and more time. In ordinary circs this news alone might’ve been enough to draw Cyprian’s soul, frail as a Fortuny gown, through a bright, small-radius ring of panic. But as his own train headed across the Mestre bridge, bound for Trieste, all he could consider with any clarity was Yashmeen, dreading what he was now obliged to tell her, wondering what recourse there could still be left for the likes of them against the storm gathering, so generally that this time not even Theign might be able to escape.
“HARDLY THE MOST hopeful news I could bring you.”
She shrugged. In stays and a dark-plumed hat today, she seemed to stand a foot taller, and spoke in measured cadences which ran counter to the accelerated coffee-rhythms of Trieste. He remembered how little she needed protecting. How far they were from Cloisters Court, and the twilit chapel at King’s. “And how likely am I to run into this Theign person?”
“I haven’t told him you’re here. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t found out, of course.”
“Do you think—”
She stopped herself, but he had heard the silent part of the question. “Your trouble in Vienna? I wouldn’t put it past him.”
She was giving him a peculiar look. “You two were intimate once. But—”
“Is he the love of my life? Yashmeen . . . You are the love of my life.” What had he just said?
She appeared to ignore it. “Yes but you continue to do whatever he tells you to. Now you’re going out there on his orders.”
“‘And England’s far,’” he quoted, not exactly in reply, “‘and honour a name.’”
“And what does that mean? his game isn’t cricket. You’re forever, all of you, banging on so about honour. Is it from having a penis or something?”
“I shouldn’t wonder.” But he had thrown her quickly a look she knew she must not respond to.
“And if he’s sending you into a trap?”
“Too elaborate for Theign. He’d simply use a hired stiletto.”
“What shall I do here in Trieste then? In this Jewish city? While I wait for my man to return?”
Once he would have snarled back at her, and the phrase “thankless task” would almost certainly have to be deployed by one of them. But lately he was finding a perverse fascination in Patience, not so much as a virtue but more as a hobby requiring discipline, like chess or mountain-climbing. He smiled as blandly as he knew how. “What do they recommend back at Chunxton Crescent?”
“They have been curiously silent.”
For a moment it was like watching each other from opposite sides of a deep opening in the earth. He marveled at the ease with which she could let hope glide away.
“I’ll put you in touch with Vlado Clissan. He should be able to keep away the usual sorts of pest anyway.”
“When will you be back from wherever it is?”
“It’s all fairly straightforward, Yashmeen, just pop over the mountains and back, shouldn’t be long. . . . What are you doing for money?”
“I’m an adventuress, money’s never a problem, even when I don’t have it. And what is that look? This cannot be about ‘honour.’”
THEY MET AT the Caffè degli Specchi and she was all, it seemed defiantly, in white, from kid boots he must make an effort to keep from gazing at to her draped velvet hat and the white egret plume on it, though the year was darkening and taking on a chill, and the modish ladies in the Piazza Grande were giving her looks. “I won’t thank you for anything,” she warned him.
“I hope not.” He glanced about at the overcast day, the indifference of commerce going on all around with or without them. Electric trams came racketing across the Piazza, bound for the train station or one of the Rive. Delivery cartmen rolled barrels of coffee down plank inclines and along the cobbles of the streets. The city smelled overwhelmingly like coffee. Most of the pedestrian traffic seemed kitted out for some formal, if not ceremonial, purpose. Boat whistles sounded in the bay. Lateeners and steam vessels glided in and out. Military personnel of all ranks rambled, ogled, preened, and glared.
They lit cigarettes and sat in front of small cups of coffee. “I’ve delivered you to this,” gesturing at the scene with his h
ead. “I deserve your curse, not your thanks.”
“It’s lovely. And where else should I be? If I turned back now, to England again, what would await me there? At Chunxton Crescent I’m regarded as having, in some way dark to me, failed. I shall never understand the motives of the T.W.I.T., their policies change day to day, they will help me, or not help, and may have even chosen, as we speak, to work me some serious mischief.”
“But it’s Limbo here. Well, Limbus actually, in Limbo being the ablative—”
She pretended to run him through with her parasol. “If Limbo is a sort of suburbs of Hell, then it is perhaps exactly the place for me. Between fire and outer darkness, enjoying the equipoise. Until I receive another omen anyway.”
“That’s what happened in Vienna? An omen?” He sat blinking. He had not cried since one drunken evening in Vienna after discovering Derrick Theign in the embrace of a miserable little five-kroner Strichmädchen that Theign had kept insisting was one of his colleagues. He had resolved in fact to give up tears as an unproductive indulgence. But now, faced with this attempt at sophisticated cheer, he was in danger of reverting. He found and clapped on a pair of blue-lensed sport spectacles.
“I’ll be all right,” she assured him. “You be as well, understand? or risk my displeasure.”
A sailor from the Lloyd Austriaco, and quite presentable, too, Cyprian had to admit, now appeared, working his way round the caffès in the Piazza, holding a ship’s bell and striking it with a small hammer and a not untheatrical flourish. Passengers gathered their impedimenta and began making their way toward the Molo San Carlo. There was this damnable stricture in Cyprian’s throat. “You don’t have to see me over the horizon,” he croaked.
A tight-lipped smile. “I have a light schedule today.”
The military band did not make things easier. Having detected a larger than usual turnout of British travelers, and waiting with some infernal clairvoyance until Cyprian thought he had a grip on himself, just as he turned to bid Yashmeen a breezy arrivederci, they began to play an arrangement for brass of “Nimrod”—what else?—from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Teutonic bluntness notwithstanding, at the first major-seventh chord, an uncertainty of pitch among the trumpets contributing its touch of unsought innocence, Cyprian felt the tap opening decisively. It was difficult to tell what Yashmeen was thinking as she offered her lips. He was concentrating on not getting her vestee wet. The music took them for an instant in its autumnal envelope, shutting out the tourist chatter, the steam horns and quayside traffic, in as honest an expression of friendship and farewell as the Victorian heart had ever managed to come up with, until finally, the band moved mercifully on to “La Gazza Ladra.” It wasn’t till Yashmeen nodded and released him that Cyprian realized they had been holding each other. “Well, I never saw what the big mystery was,” she shrugged, “it’s only ‘The Volga Boatmen,’ isn’t it.”
“No. No, I always thought it was ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”
“Oh but do let’s not quarrel Gonzalo.”
“But of course not, Millicent,” he chirped back, flashed his teeth, and started up the brow.
“Drop me a postal, now don’t forget!”
“As soon as ever I can!” Adding, for some reason, under his breath, “My life.”
AFTER HE HAD disappeared behind the breakwater, Yashmeen strolled down the Riva Carciotti, found a spot, lit up a cigarette and lounged awhile, beaming mindlessly upon the shifting scene. A cat followed her back to her room and would not leave. She named her Cyprienne, and before long they were close friends.
One day Yashmeen, out in the bora, just for a still-bracing Δt, had a relapse into her old Zetamania. She remembered that Littlewood, after struggling with a reluctant lemma one winter at Davos, through weeks of föhn—the bora’s opposite, a wind so dry and warm that in some parts of the Swiss Alps it is called a “scirocco”—had reported that when that wind dropped for a day, the solution, as if by magic, was there. And no doubt because the bora, known in these parts as the “wind of the dead,” descending out of the Karst, blowing uninterrupted for long enough, will also—with required changes of sign—have its effect upon the mathematical mind, as the brain lobes for this sort of thing began to relax, and strange and even counterintuitive thoughts to arrive from somewhere else co-conscious with the everyday, something similar happened now to Yashmeen. Just for the instant, the matter was illuminated, unequivocally, something as obvious as Ramanujan’s Formula—no, something of which Ramanujan’s Formula was a special case—revealed why Riemann should have hypothesized one-half as the real part of every ζ(0), why he had needed to, at just that point in his thinking . . . she was released into her past, haunting her old self, almost close enough to touch—and then of course it was gone again and she was more immediately concerned with the loss of her hat, flying away to join hundreds of others in migration to some more southerly climate, some tropical resort of hats where they could find weeks of hat dolce far niente to grow new feathers, allow their color to return or find new shades, lie and dream about heads that Fate had meant them to adorn. . . . Not to mention the need to keep her manteau from becoming a sort of anti-parachute which sought to lift her free of the pavement. She stood disbelieving, hair progressively loosening and flaring into a wet dark aurora, a grin less puzzled than aggravated turned against the incoming Adriatic norther, which for a moment, with that rogue conjecture, had delivered her into shadowy abduction wherever it might have led, and she could imagine, after all, visiting this coast for its wind, as a different sort of tourist might a hydropathic, for some miraculous spring, some return to youth.
And of course it was just in that instant that she met up with Vlado Clissan, who was staggering for shelter into the same doorway. The bora, as if collaborating, lifted her skirts and underskirts without warning over her face, as if a classical goddess were about to arrive in a cloud of crêpe lisse, and in the moment one of his hands had seized her, down between her bared legs, which opened further almost by reflex, one leg lifting, sliding up alongside his hip to clasp him tightly while she tried in the infernal wind to stay balanced on her other foot. Her hair, all undone now, lashed his face, his penis was somehow out in the rain and uproar, this could not be happening, she only had glimpses of his face, his smile fierce as the storm, he was tearing the fine batiste of her drawers, she felt every divided second of his entry and penetration, her clitoris was being addressed in an unfamiliar way, not rudely, actually quite considerately, perhaps it was the angle . . . but how could she be thinking of geometry . . . but if she didn’t keep some attachment to that, where would they be taken? Out to sea. Up above the town and into the immemorial Karst. Up into the Karst, to a vineyard gate and an osmizza just inside that served meals and wine, the lights of Trieste far below, a wine ancient before Illyria, nameless, wind-finished, ethereal in its absence of color. And because here on this coast wine had never simply been wine, any more than politics was simply politics—there lay as-yet-undiscovered notes of redemption, time-reversal, unexpected agency.
“I was down there looking for you. Latewood gave me your address.”
“He said you . . .” Her conversational resources faltered. Had she ever wanted so much to keep looking into a man’s eyes? What was this? Vlado was not, she must be clear with herself, in no way was he a substitute for Cyprian, some desperate bounce she had taken because Cyprian had left, despite her best efforts to persuade him to stay. . . .
IT WASN’T EXACTLY the Hôtel de Ville, nor was she sleeping too frightfully well. The place seemed surrounded with tram lines, and the noise was, well, not really unremitting, there were quiet spaces between trams, unpredictable, even, she imagined, mathematically so. But it was the coffee metropolis of the Austrian Empire here, if not of the world, and she was never farther than half a block from the counter-soporific fluid, so she was able to get through most days without falling into slumber inconveniently, say in the middle of an attempt to avoid what she imagined, in her sleepless and p
aranoiac state, to be pursuit.
Vlado, who was unpredictably in and out of town, showed up at the door it seemed only when he desired her, which turned out to be often. How could a girl not be flattered? Obviously it could not be, could it, as simple as desire, but it was not the careful protocol of courting that required appointments in advance either. She had learned to recognize his step on the carpetless stairway—among the bull-elephant thundering of sailors, the imperious creep of philandering merchants, the march-tempo of Austrian military, each insisting on his primacy, there was no mistaking Vlado, the sensitive crescendo of his no less fervid approach.
By now she had heard enough through the walls to know that when one is having an orgasm in Croatian, the thing to scream is “Svr šavam!” though she didn’t always remember to, memory having been, in the event, often disengaged.
Vlado kept an address in Venice, a couple of rooms in Cannareggio, in the old ghetto, multiply-nested among Jews pushed heavenward floor above floor . . . and nearly impossible to locate. And somehow that’s where she found herself more and more. I’m turning Jewish, she thought, all that Viennese anti-Semitism is conjuring up what it most hates, how odd. . . . “I don’t know. I was expecting horses, abduction up into the Velebit, wolves at night.”
He pretended to think about this. “You wouldn’t mind if I did a little business while we’re down here. And take in the city sights of Venice of course, a gondola ride, Florian’s, that sort of thing. Wolves, we can arrange wolves I’m sure.”
ONE DAY THEY took the train to Fiume and boarded the mail steamer for Zengg, with a dozen German tourists and a small herd of goats. “I have to show you this,” he said. He meant, “This is who I am,” but she didn’t understand until it was too late to matter. Eventually the narrow passage between the island of Veglia and the mainland opened out into the Morlacca Canal, and within two hours they stood off Zengg, facing a fierce bora which came barreling down through a gap in the Velebit. It was as if the sea would not allow them to enter. The sea here, Vlado said, the currents and wind, were a composite being with intentions of its own. It had a name which was never spoken. Coastal sailors here told of individual waves with faces, and voices, which persisted from day to day, instead of blending back into the general swell.
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