“Stationary waves,” she speculated.
“Sentries,” replied Vlado.
“How are we going to get into port then?”
“The captain is one of the Novlians, an old Uskok family. It is in his blood. He knows how to do business with them.”
She watched the hillside town, pastel houses, bell-towers, a ruined castle at the top. The bells now all began to ring at once. The bora carried the sound out to the steamer. “Each campanile in Zengg is tuned to a different ecclesiastical mode,” said Vlado. “Listen to the dissonances.” Yashmeen heard them move through the field of metal tones like slow wingbeats . . . and at the base of it the sea’s outlaw pulse.
Ashore it seemed that all the Uskok hinterland, not only in geographical space but also a backcountry of time, had come piling into town as if for a fair or market. The old rivalries between Turkey and Austria, even Venice enigmatically hovering as always, were still alive, because the Peninsula was still the mixture of faiths and languages it had always been, the Adriatic was still the fertile field wherein merchant shipping must be prey to the wolves of piracy who lurked among the maze of islands that so confounded the Argonauts even before history began.
“Until the early sixteenth century, we lived on the other side of the mountains. Then the Turks invaded, and forced us off our land. We came over the Velebit range and down to the sea, and kept fighting them all the way. We were guerrillas. The Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I gave us an annual subsidy. Our great fortress was just inland from Split, at Clissa, which is where my name comes from. We fought the Turks on land and kept them on the other side of the Velebit, but we also learned to fight them at sea. Our boats were better, more nimble, they could go where vessels of deeper draft could not, and if we had to land, we could beach and hide them by sinking them, do our business, come back, raise them again and sail away. For generations we defended Christendom even when Venice could not. And it was Venice who sold us out. They made a deal with the Turks, guaranteeing their safety in the Adriatic. So we did what anybody would have done. We kept attacking ships, only now Venetian ships as well as Turkish. Many of these carried unexpectedly rich cargoes.”
“You were pirates,” she said.
Vlado made a face. “We try to avoid that word. You know the play by Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice? Very popular with us, of course from the Uskok point of view, we keep hoping till the end for Antonio to come to grief.”
“You ate people’s hearts,” she said, “so the stories go.”
“Myself, personally? no. Raw heart is an acquired taste, and by that time, ‘Uskok’ had come to embrace the mala vita of all Europe, including a number of quite notorious British Uskoks, several of whom were hanged in Venice in 1618, some of them nobility.”
“There are English people who’d be impressed by that,” Yash supposed, “while others might attribute it to hereditary idiocy.”
They had climbed to the ruin of the ancient fortress. “The Venetians did this. They hanged Uskoks, sank our ships, destroyed our fortresses. Dispersed the rest of us, completing what the Turks had begun. Since then, four hundred years, we have been exiles in our own land. No reason to love Venice, and yet we continue to dream of her, as Germans are said to dream of Paris. Venice is the bride of the sea, whom we wish to abduct, to worship, to hope in vain someday to be loved by. But of course she will never love us. We are pirates, aren’t we, brutal and simple, too attached to the outsides of things, always amazed when blood flows from the wound of our enemy. We cannot conceive of any interior that might be its source, yet we obey its demands, arriving by surprise from some Beyond we cannot imagine, as if from one of the underground rivers of the Velebit, down in that labyrinth of streams, lakes, coves, and cataracts, each with its narrative, sometimes even older than the Argonauts’ expedition—before history, or even the possibility of connected chronology—before maps, for what is a map in that lightless underworld, what pilgrimage can it mark out the stations of?”
“A list of obstacles to be braved,” she said. “What other sort of journey is there?”
They stayed overnight at the Zagreb Hotel. Shortly after sunrise Vlado disappeared upcountry on one of his political errands. She had coffee and a palačinka and drifted through the narrow streets of the town, at midday, on an impulse too hidden from her to account for, entering a little church, kneeling and praying for his safety.
At dusk she was at a table outside a café, and knew from the way he came strolling through the little piazza that there had been a recreational element in his day he would not tell her about. The moment they were in the room, he had seized her, turned her around, forced her onto her face and knees, lifted her dress, and entered her savagely from behind. Her eyes filled with tears, and a great erotic despair filled her like an unending breath. She came with the intensity she had grown to expect with Vlado, trying this time to do so in silence, to keep at least this for herself, but with no success.
“You have eaten my heart,” she cried.
Cyprian, embarking from the Molo San Carlo on the Austrian Lloyd express steamer John of Asia, found the decks aswarm with butterfly-hunters, bird-watchers, widows and divorcées, photographers, school-girls and their guardians, all of whom, without undue exercise of the organs of fantasy, might be supposed foreign spies, it being clearly in the interests of Italy, Serbia, Turkey, Russia, and Great Britain to know what was afoot at the Austrian installations at Pola and the Bocche di Cattaro and the coastline approaching infinite length which lay in between.
Yashmeen’s white tall figure, parasol over her shoulder, already a ghost in full sunlight, went fading into the crowds flowing in and out through the trees between the quay and the Piazza Grande. A young birch in a sombre forest. But he still could see her pale phantom long after it ought to have vanished behind the lighthouse and the breakwaters.
If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected, as we watch the possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance ahead and astern, port and starboard, everywhere an expanding of possibility, even for ship’s company who may’ve made this run hundreds of times. . . .
The plan was to pick up Bevis Moistleigh at Pola, the Austrian naval base five hours down the coast at the tip of the Istrian Peninsula. Bevis had been down there pretending to be a neuræsthenic on a budget, staying at a modest hotel off the Via Arsenale.
They passed smoothly along the red-and-green Istrian coast, and as they neared Pola, a ship’s officer went up and down the weather decks advising tourists with cameras that for military reasons photographs were now prohibited. Cyprian noticed a sprightly young creature scampering all round the ship in a translucent sailor-girl’s outfit of white lawn and lace, hatless, charming everybody in her path, including Cyprian, he supposed. He learned with little effort that her name was Jacintha Drulov, that her mother was English and her father Croatian, both aristocrats, who had both unfortunately passed away in her infancy in the course of separate golfing accidents, and that she was now under the protection of her mother’s cousin Lady Quethlock, with whom she had recently spent a brief holiday in Venice before returning to school at the Zhenski Tzrnogorski Institut in Cetinje. As soon as Cyprian observed guardian and ward together, certain nuances of touching, intentions to touch, withholdings of touch, as well as publicly inflicted torments of a refinement he recognized, suggested strongly that he was in the presence of a Lady Spy and her apprentice. This was confirmed by the mutterings of a pair Cyprian had already spotted as senior desk agents, of the sort who consider the employment of nubile children as field “ops” quite inexcusable.
“What can the damned fool woman have in mind?”
“Lucky bitch, actually. I know what I’d have in
mind.”
When Bevis Moistleigh came aboard at Pola and caught sight of Jacintha, he was instantly and publicly smitten. Cyprian felt frightfully happy for him of course, there being little enough passion in the world isn’t there, yes—but decided to keep his suspicions about the devious dewdrop to himself for the moment, partly to see how much Bevis could find out on his own.
THE JOHN OF ASIA had begun to pass among island cities, variations on the theme of Venice, domes, villas, and shrines arpeggiated along the irregular Croatian coastline, white campanili and towers less explicable, older, grayer, put up against some ancient approach no longer definable, and all-but-uncharted strange miniature islets holding antique structures too small for worship, sentry duty or imprisonment. Fish known locally as “sea swallows” darted among the wave-tops. From the saloon, where two-headed eagles adorned the furniture, the drapes, and for that matter anyplace else one looked, Cyprian gazed out at the flowing scenery, as Bevis reeled out a line of patter no girl, however desperate for company, would ever have sat still for, except that Jacintha here appeared to be listening with a most peculiar eagerness.
“As many have demonstrated, notably I suppose Baden-Powell, one cannot overestimate the value of appearing to dwell in a state of idiocy. In fact Jacintha did you know that there is now an entire branch of spy-craft known as Applied Idiotics—yes, including my own school, a sort of training facility run by the Secret Service, near Chipping Sodbury actually, the Modern Imperial Institute for Intensive Instruction In Idiotics—or M.6I., as it’s commonly known.”
“How ever so much more exciting Bevis, than the dull little girls’ academy I must attend, so relentlessly normal, don’t you know.”
“But I say Jacintha at M.6I. no aspect of school life was exempt really, even the food was idiotic—in hall for example the chip-shop approach was actually extended to deep-frying such queer items as chocolate bonbons and fairy cakes—”
“What, no fish Bevis.”
“Dear me no Jacintha, that would be ‘brain food,’ wouldn’t it—and the school uniform featured these ever so excruciatingly tight pointed hats, which one must wear even—indeed, especially—while one slept, and unspeakably awful neckties of the sort that, out in the civilian world, frankly, only, well, idiots would ever be found wearing . . . one’s physical training began each dawn with a set of exercises in eye-crossing, lip relaxation, irregular gaits of as many varieties as there are dance-steps. . . .”
“That many? Really?” Jacintha flourishing her lashes.
“Let me show you.” He motioned to the band. “I say, do you chaps know ‘The Idiotic’?”
“Sure!” replied the accordionist, “we play ‘Idiotic’! You give us money!”
The little orchestra struck up the lively two-step currently sweeping civilized Europe, and Bevis, seizing Jacintha, began to stagger quite uncoördinatedly about the pocket-size saloon, while the game lass did her best to follow his lead, both of them singing,
Out on the floor, used
To be such a bore,
Till we discov-ered
What thrills were in store, with
That step ex-otic, known as
‘The Idiotic’ . . .
Head like a pin? drool down your chin?
Could qualify-you
To give it a spin, tho’
It sounds neurotic,
It’s just ‘The Idiotic’!
Take all those
Waltzes and polkas,
Stuff’em all-down-a-hole, ’coz
There’s a scat-terbrained rhyth-m to-day . . .
It’s the new ‘Idiot-ic,’
And it’s kinda hypnotic,
In its own imbecil-ical way!
(Say),
Try, it once-and-you’ll-find
You’ve, gone out-of-your-mind
For—the craze of the mo-ment,
That’s one-of-a-kind,
And it’s just-so narcot-ic, that
I ven-ture to say . . . you’ll
Be doing ‘The
Id-iotic,’ till they
Gotta-come take you a-way!
“And I must say Jacintha the girls at the dances we were obliged to attend were not nearly as jolly as yourself. Quite serious you know, obsessed by ever such dark thoughts. Actually, well, institutionalized, many of them. . . .”
“Oh, dear,” chirped Jacintha, “how dreadful for you Bevis, obviously you escaped, but however did you manage to?”
“Ah. Certain arrangements. Always possible among gentlemen and no hard feelings.”
“Then you are still with the same . . .” the lightly foreign shading she put on vowels producing its inviting effect, “gentlemanly apparatus?”
Now, Bevis’s having been tipped for Idiotics instruction had been no random decision. No, no—indeed, crypto genius and all, in other areas of life idiocy came as naturally to him as a gift for leg-spin delivery might to another youth. A girl aboard an Austrian vessel, attending a Tsarist school and accompanied by English nobility, could of course be working for any number of shops—and Entente or not, in the present climate of annexation and crisis, Cyprian supposed due diligence called for a spot of intrusion about now.
But young Jacintha was ahead of him it seemed. She had approached him and, standing quite close, begun pulling at his necktie with some insistence. “Come Cyprian, you simply must dance with me.”
No one could remember ever seeing Cyprian dance. “Sorry . . . under a court injunction, actually. . . .” Jacintha, her head set at a sweetly enticing angle, begged as if her heart would be broken forever if he did not immediately jump up and make a fool of himself all up and down the saloon. “Besides,” she whispered, “however bad you think you are, you must be better than your friend Bevis.”
“Oh, must I. Those charming feet are to be adored, not assaulted.”
“We shall have to see about that too, then, shan’t we,” with a steady gaze experience would no doubt improve to a point where men would offer to pay her to speak just these words—for now Cyprian could not avoid thinking of Yashmeen in a similar exchange, though loyalty, if that’s what it was, did little to moderate the erection he seemed to have been visited by, here. Jacintha regarded it with an all but predatory little smile.
Meanwhile, out on deck, Lady Quethlock was engaged in conversation with two other spies pretending to be idiots.
“No, no,” she was saying, “not gold, not gems, not oil or ancient artifacts, but the source of the world’s most enigmatic river.”
“What, the Nile? But—”
“Eridanus, actually.”
“But that’s the old Po, isn’t it?”
“If you believe Virgil, who’s fairly late in the game—but the geography, regrettably, doesn’t bear it out. If one goes back to the Argo, in Apollonius of Rhodes’s account of that strange transpeninsular passage from Euxine to Cronian Seas—the forces of Colchis both in pursuit and waiting in ambush, the personal complexities of Medea to be dealt with and so forth, the Argonauts sailing into the mouth of the Danube and upstream, and somehow, nervously one imagines, emerging into the Adriatic—cannot be credited unless at some point they go by underground river, most likely the Timavo, a river to the sea at whose mouth according to Apollonius lie so many islets that the Argo can scarcely thread her way among them. The Po Delta has few if any such islands, but over on this side of the Adriatic, just over there in fact off our port beam as we speak, it’s a different story, isn’t it.”
“But Virgil—”
“Is confusing Padus with Timavus, I expect.”
“So these,” a gesture out to the passing shore, “are the Amber Islands of legend.”
“May be. I am hoping to resolve the question.”
“Ah, the lovely Jacintha.”
“Have you a moment Aunt? I do need some advice.”
“You are perspiring, girl. What have you been up to?”
Jacintha had her hands behind her back and her head bowed, a proper little captive. T
hrough her translucent dress the company could see every fine movement of her limbs, and were duly entertained.
THOUGH CYPRIAN AND BEVIS had decided to go in by way of the Herzegovina, Metković having for a few seasons now been implausible as a tourist destination because of the fever, they continued down to Kotor before debarking, Jacintha’s company being a useful pretext for not getting off earlier at Ragusa. Cyprian, with no more than a vague code about honoring the idiocy of others, blinked rapidly but went along with the change in plan.
After a farewell whose poignancy if any, was lost on Cyprian, he and a signally glum Bevis Moistleigh ate at a waterfront restaurant that served a local brodet full of skarpina, eels, and prawns, then proceeded to the quay and engaged a boat which took them along the south shore of the Gulf of Cattaro, beneath all manner of fjord scenery, through a narrow canal known locally as “the Chains” and into the Bay of Teodo, all under the gaze of lenses, multiplied beyond counting, stationed at every vantage, though the specular highlights that twinkled at them from shore were not due only to optical devices. At Zelenika they sat drinking sage-flavored grappa before boarding the train for Sarajevo, which took them all the way back along the coast, through Hum and fever-ridden Metković, where they turned inland and began to climb into the Herzegovina toward Mostar, six hours away, then six more to Sarajevo.
IN SARAJEVO pale minarets rose above the trees. Swallows traced fading black trails across the afternoon-light, beneath which the river through town appeared red. At the Café Marienhof across the street from the tobacco factory, down at the Turkish bath, in dozens of chance meetings in the Bazaar, immediately, unable to help it, someone would be remarking on the Austrian outrage.
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