“You’ll be next, I imagine,” Cyprian was afraid he rather snapped back.
“Some choice—the fucking Austrians out there or your dubious protection. Either way, I’m dead.” In Jajce there was a hundred-foot waterfall, with most of the town up on an egg-shaped hill, and an ancient fortress. They decided to walk from the station out, to the Grand-Hôtel, on the theory that if Bevis were in the neighborhood, he’d likely be there. The place looked like it had been transported in, by some dark art, direct from the Austrian Alps. Cyprian cupped an ear. “Is that yodeling I hear? Will the staff be wearing those, those hats? lederhosen? Actually, lederhosen in the present circs . . .” he lapsed into a moment’s heated reverie.
Nobody at the reception desk had seen Bevis. “But those gentlemen over there have been waiting for you, I believe.”
Cyprian was down into a spinning crouch and trying to remember where he’d put his pistol. Danilo waited with a caustic smile, shaking his head slowly side to side as the two visitors, creating around themselves a zone of avoidance, approached.
Black Hand, Danilo was sure. “As long as they think we are Serbian agents, they will be sympathetic—Zdravo, gospodini.”
Wasting no time on pleasantries, Batko, the larger of the two, nodded them toward the restaurant bar. Cyprian had an impression of dark wood and antlered heads. Batko ordered šljivovica all round. His companion, Senta, took out a pocket notebook, studied it briefly, and said, “Here it is, then—you must keep clear of all trains.”
“Ne razumen,” puzzled Danilo.
“Austrians are trying to make sure you two never get to the Croatian border. They have sent in motor vehicles, and at least a dozen well-armed men.”
“For little us?” said Cyprian.
“We of the—” Batko, pretending to pout, left a pulse of silence where it was advisable not to insert “Black Hand”—“will always protect our own. But you are guests in Bosnia, and tradition says that guests are last to die. And considering who it is that wants to kill you . . .” He shrugged.
“Your choices from here on are few.” Senta produced a small, damaged map, apparently removed from a guidebook. “You can go on foot, up the river, here, two days, to Banjaluka, and if you feel by then that you must risk the train again, try for Zagreb. Or you can go back the way you came, back through Vakuf, to Bugojno, where you can pick up the diligence route, through the mountains, down to the coast, and find a boat out of Split. There are of course a thousand footpaths, and it’s easy to get lost, it is nearly winter, there are wolves, so the carriage road might be best for you, as long as you stay alert.”
“Once we got over the crestline,” Cyprian said, “I’d feel comfortable enough in the Velebit, and I know people there. But I don’t suppose we could hire a guide for this side,” which provoked some merriment.
“These are busy times for everyone,” explained Batko. “If you really needed help, you could try shouting ‘Union or Death,’ but there’d be no guarantee. . . .”
The discussion proved academic, soon enough.
CYPRIAN AND DANILO made their way along a valley, leaves on the steep hillsides changing color, willows down by the water gone leafless and broodful, small waterfalls loud in the autumnal withdrawal of humans and live-stock, the air cool and still, and no sign of unwelcome attention since they had left Batko and Senta, faces furrowed in sad farewell, by the chlorine works outside of town.
That evening they bought a trout and some cooked crayfish in a bag and had just entered an olive grove where they were thinking of settling for the night, when with no warning the air was filled with the high-speed purring of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition striking, for the moment, surfaces other than human and bouncing mercifully elsewhere, though it was now of the essence to find one’s way inside the moment, with death invisible and everywhere, “like God,” it occurred to Danilo afterward. Plaster was spalled off the stone walls by the road. Patches of white dust were kicked up into the air. They went running through the olive grove, leaves of the trees twitching in the invisible storm, nearly ripened fruit falling. Geese somewhere woke up and began to clamor, as if this sort of thing was supposed to go on only in the daytime.
“Do you have your pistol?”
Danilo waved a little Portuguese army .32 Savage. “It doesn’t matter, I’ve only two clips for it.”
They ran half blind for higher ground. The dark saved them. So they were chased off, uphill, among rock pinnacles, into the forest and the mountains and progressively wilder terrain, and all question of alloyed steel, geometric purity of gauge, railways and timetables and the greater network, not to mention European time as it usually passed, ceased to be any part of their day, and they were swept back into the previous century. Autumn kept rolling in, the colors darkening, the black that rests at the heart of all color reasserting itself. The mountains were draped in banners of cloud torn as if from distant battles already begun, projections of the Crisis. . . . Sheep that had mingled with the shadows of clouds across the valley floors were presently gone to shelter against the winter nearly upon this country, the limestone mountains seemed to climb the sky, to grow more proud, as temperatures fell, and the first snow appeared on the heights. Chimney smoke from lignite fires collected in the valleys. The light in these mountains toward dusk grew solemn and awful. The fugitives longed to be in out of it, and yet knew their only chances for deliverance here lay outdoors, away from refuge-huts, hunting lodges and hydropathics. They must be where the stone martens glided like ghosts from shadow to shadow, and cave entrances offered not security but fear.
All converged to black, black unmitigated by candleflames or woodsmoke. Each night a drama commenced, in languages even Danilo could not always understand. Outside of the little upland basins called poljes, where were the village folk who had so carefully avoided them in the light—where, among these limestone wastes, were there even villages? Not a soul remained outdoors after dark to gather, kindle, cook, or husband—all community withdrew to dens, tunneling, the dorsal indifference of the beast. The still surfaces of mountain ponds reflected starlight of white gold, now and then obscured by whatever was abroad in this mineral desert.
One evening, just before sunset, they looked up at the wall of mountains, and all the way to the ridgeline there were these strange patches of light, everywhere, too bright for snow yet not orange or red enough for fire, as great sheets of glowing vapor swept the valley beneath, and against the reflection in the river of this incandescent passage, erect on an ancient bridge, above its pure arch in silhouette, stood a figure, cloaked, solitary, unmoving, not waiting, not beckoning, not even regarding the spectacle up on the mountainside, yet containing in its severe contours a huge compressed quantity of attention, directed at something Cyprian and Danilo couldn’t see, though presently they understood that they ought to have.
THEY WERE CAUGHT one night on a nameless black mountainside, by a storm that had descended from the north and a premonitory silence. Danilo, a city-dweller all his life, looked around, as if expecting an umbrella-vendor to appear.
“Djavola! this weather!”
“Unless you’re British,” Cyprian pointed out, “then it’s almost like home, yes quite cozy actually. . . . Do you think we’ve lost them by now?”
“They’ve lost us. Driven us up here, where the mountain can do the work for them. Saves them bullets, too.”
They had come to a fearful halt, pressed against the ice-slick rock risen uncounted ages ago as if just for this hour. . . . There was no light from anywhere. They knew the terrain opened everywhere into ravines whose walls dropped straight down. Neither knew the way down off this fierce black precipice.
When he tripped and fell, Cyprian for the first time was delivered into an embrace that did not desire him, as he became only another part of the mechanical realm, the ensouled body he had believed in until now suddenly of far less account than mass and velocity and cold gravity, here before him, after him, despite him. As the storm roared all around
, he slowly struggled to his knees and, finding no pain beyond the expected, to his feet. Danilo had vanished. Cyprian called, but the storm was too loud. He didn’t know which direction to start looking in. He stood in rain just at the edge of sleet and considered praying.
“Latewood.”
Not far. Carefully, night and storm-blind, Cyprian moved toward the voice. He came upon a drenched and broken animal presence he could not see.
“Don’t touch anything. I think my leg is broken.”
“Can you—”
“I can’t stand on it—just tried.” Long ago, in rented rooms, shadows of colonnades, public gardens, bourgeois amenities of a world at peace, Cyprian had come to imagine himself gifted at hearing the residues of truth behind the lies everyone tells in the dark. Here, now, in this less compromised blackness, what he heard from Danilo was too plain. “You must bring me out,” the barely covert voice said—without the possibility of another meaning. “We must use this.” It was an ancient Mauser they had found in an empty house back down the mountainside.
“But we’ll need it for—”
Patiently, Danilo explained. Cyprian took off his coat, which was nearly blown from his grasp, and then his shirt, the cold hitting him like a street-brute indifferent to anything he might have appealed with, tore the shirt into strips and attempted with fingers rapidly losing all sensation to tie the rifle to Danilo’s broken leg for a splint. “Can you straighten it?” Ice-points were now being driven horizontally at their faces.
“I can, but I’m not sure I want to.” Even through his numb hands, Cyprian could feel the wrongness. Hands tuned to the musculature of limbs, the refined appreciation of bodily perfection, now found themselves failing before the need to put right this insult. “Do it,” Danilo shouted angrily against the wind. There was no reason out here not to cry as loudly as he must for the pain. “En tu kulo Dio!”
With the rifle butt under his armpit, Danilo found he could hobble short distances, at least at first. But the going was too slow, it hurt too much, and before long Cyprian found himself supporting Danilo’s weight again. He knew they had to follow divides till they came to a major ravine and then descend to the streambed and keep heading downhill till they found human habitation. Before they froze to death. That was the theory anyway. But shelter, any pocket of calm air in which a flame might last long enough to take hold, a ledge wide enough for five minutes of sleep, none of these domestic pleasantries were about to appear. There was frostbite to consider, at every step, every change in the wind. If they even stopped moving, they would freeze. Moving was the key, arrival at a place of safety was for now a luxury too remote to think about. Wolves called to one another, as if keeping track of an evening menu considerately delivered among them. Occasionally, when the storm had passed, there would be moonlight to pick up and set aglow a pair of interested eyes. Only long enough for the creature to turn its head to a different angle, as if not wishing to reveal its gaze for too long. By now Danilo was running a fever. His weight slowly grew toward the absolute inertia of a corpse. Sometimes, unaccountably, he would no longer be there.
“Where are you?” Cyprian could feel the wind taking his voice away into its vast indifference.
“Where are you?” he cried. He wished, terribly, for no answer.
THE RAIN BLEW down the valley, at the verge of snow, stinging, thin, a white European rover with vicious intentions.
“I’d been expecting, I don’t know, a weekend in the country sort of thing,” Cyprian said. “‘Snow? not to worry, mean temperature in Sarajevo is fifty degrees Fahrenheit, a light ulster should do the trick.’ Fucking Theign, thanks ever so much.”
They had found a very small village, an accretion of stonework hanging from the side of a mountain, and had been allowed to winter there. One passed from one chamber to another, some of them roofed, some not, by way of rough stairs and archways, snow-pierced tunnels, muddy courtyards, whose construction, beginning long ago with a single farm shed, had extended over centuries. Bitter-cold sleet and snow, wind-borne, raced among the ravines, wailed among the tiles of the roofs. The other side of the valley was often invisible, clouds descended in salients sharply run like the defenses of a walled town, all color disappeared, the summer was a country of wistful legend, no longer real or recoverable. Wet dogs, descended from ancestors who had lived here during the Dark Ages, recalling sunned walls in whose shade they had once lain, now sought the uncertainties of indoor life. There were lignite workings across the valley, Cyprian could smell it when the wind was right, and now and then it was possible to cross over with a donkey and scavenge some, an all-day task in the best of weather and usually extending over a night or two—but what preoccupied the residents most was the location of firewood caches—these were more like hoarded treasure as the season deepened, and village opinion held it legitimate to kill, at least aim and shoot at, anyone who took wood not his own. The smell of woodsmoke anywhere among the stone baffle-work was an outward sign of some family event kept otherwise inside shutters of silence. “She thinks she’s cold again,” they nodded, or, “Snežana is boiling more potatoes. There can’t be too many left by now.”
At first from fever, then in long calm descents to sleep, as he slowly began to mend, Danilo began to talk about Salonica, the city of his youth, the women by the fountains in the mornings, his mother’s pastel de kwezo, parades in the streets of wrestlers and Gypsy musicians, the all-night cafés. “At first I tried to get back there as often as I could, but responsibilities in Sarajevo piled up, and one day I woke to find I’d become a Bosniak. I wish I could show it to you someday, Latewood, Salonica is all the world in a single city, and you must meet my cousin Vesna, she sings in a hasheesh joint down in the Bara, you’ll love her as I do. . . .”
Cyprian blinked politely. No questions of desire, either between themselves or for third parties, had ever arisen—it might have been the general exhaustion the young men both had to fight moment by moment, or their simple discovery that neither was the other’s sort, or, strangest of all, that in some scarcely acknowledged way, Cyprian had become Danilo’s mother. He was surprised to find emerging in his character previously unsuspected gifts, notably one for soup, as well as an often-absurd willingness to sacrifice all comfort until he was satisfied that Danilo would be safe for another spell, however brief.
This first encounter with release from desire brought Cyprian the unexpected delight of a first orgasm. He was sitting up in a black and thickly clouded night, tending to Danilo’s sleep, as if he must be prepared in an instant to intervene if needed, to walk the other man’s painscapes of dream or delirium. All at once, no not all at once, more like the way one wakes sometimes very slowly to the awareness there is light in the room, he found that for some undefined time now he had not even been imagining desire, its arousal, its fulfillment, any occasion for it. The imbalance he was used to experiencing as a numb space in the sensorium of the day, as if time were provided with sexual nerves, a patch of which had been waiting unaddressed, was, somewhat mysteriously, no longer there—it was occupied by something else, a clarity, a general freshening of temperature. . . .
Of course it passed, the way a pulse of desire itself will, but the odd thing was that he found himself always unexpectedly trying to locate it again, as if it were something at least as desirable as desire.
Danilo was getting about quite well on a stick with the head of a wolf for a handle, carved over the winter from mountain ash for him by his friend Zaim. He came in one day to find Cyprian cutting up potatoes, winter carrots and onions to put into a soup, and for the first time they talked about their passage through the mountains.
“It was luck,” Cyprian shrugged. “We were lucky.”
“It was the will of God,” Danilo said.
“Which of your several Gods would that be, again?”
“There is only God.”
Cyprian was nowhere near as certain. But seeing the usefulness of remaining attached to the day, he only nodde
d and went on chopping up vegetables.
WHEN THEY GOT BACK again to steel and parallel tracks, they found the lines nervous with an all but mortal appetency, bands of irregulars carrying ancient long rifles whose brass fittings were incised with holy verses from the Quran, Bosnian Catholic units with Mannlichers furnished by their Austrian masters, Turkish guerrillas heading for Constantinople and the revolution at home, Austrian regular army swarming at the frontiers, stopping everyone, with no indulgence shown English tourists, which was what Cyprian had been hoping to pass for, or even German ones, who were there in numbers, as if to witness some godless spectacle, a passion play without a Christ.
It is in the nature of prey, Cyprian was later to reflect, that at times, instead of submitting to the demands of some predator, they will insist upon being difficult. Running for their lives. Putting on disguises. Disappearing into clouds of ink, miles of bush, holes in the earth. Even, strange to tell, fighting back. Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise.
The important thing in considering disguises, Cyprian supposed, was not to look Russian. It wasn’t that the skills he needed came to him suddenly by any special providence—there was little this time out he had not done before. At Bosna-Brod he was obliged, from within a toilette whose relation to any sort of taste was better left unexplored, to play the part of a civil-service wife, contemptuous of all that was not English, demanding in a shrill tessitura to be allowed through to reunite with a husband for whom, though fictional, Cyprian was carefully able to suggest less than complete adoration, while carrying on a tirade against all things Bosnian, the accommodations, the food—“Whose idea was this mutton-and-spinach horror?” “Is kapama, is good, eh?”—even, as if forgetting how risky it might prove, the men—“What possible maiden’s prayer can you be thinking yourselves the answer to, with those ridiculous baggy trousers and headscarves . . .” the odd thing being that these particular irregulars were as handsome and muscular as once upon a time anyone could have desired . . . but it was more important to locate all the firearms, visible and otherwise, likely to be hostile, a matter of minutes, and to choose—almost, by now, automatically, more than one likely avenue of escape . . . at times he invoked the opposite of disguise and withdrew into a fatalistic submissiveness so complete that after he and Danilo had passed by, no one even remembered seeing them, though by then Danilo’s injury had reasserted itself, along with his despair. There were hours in their passage Cyprian wanted to cry for the other man’s suffering but knew with the absence of mercy peculiar above all to prey that survival, in cases like theirs, did not lie in the direction of sentiment.
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