At Belgrade they found both rivers under interdiction. It made Cyprian that much more angrily determined to get out. In late-winter fog, among domes and spires of rusted iron and stone, oversize angels, broken, defaced, but still standing in hilltop isolation, their faces strangely, carefully specific, Danilo and Cyprian moved south through Serbia but learned presently that all roads over the mountains to the coast would be snowed in for weeks yet.
IN PLJEVLJE THEY STOPPED for a day just to get their bearings. There was snow on the brown heights. It was a small pretty town with four minarets and one campanile and the Pasha’s konak sprawling across the foothills. Austrian garrisons were in the process of pulling out, as they were all through the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, as part of a bargain with Turkey over the annexation—blue masses fragmented by snow falling intermittently, lines passing radially one by one, as if some great apocalyptic wheel had begun at last to turn . . . clutch-plates slamming into engagement, chattering drafts of youngsters in ill-fitted uniforms marched off into general dusk.
“If we could find a way to get to Kossovska Mitrovitsa,” Danilo reckoned, “eighty, maybe a hundred miles, we could catch a train south to Salonica.”
“Your childhood home,” Cyprian recalled. “Your cousin Vesna and whatnot.”
“Years. Until now it has not felt like exile.”
Back in January, Austria’s reptilian foreign minister Aerenthal had finally got a concession from the Sultan to build a line from the Bosnian border, through the Sanjak, to the Turkish railhead at Kossovska Mitrovitsa. Now it lay there, this notional railway not yet built, invisible across the snow and passes and valleys, an element of diplomacy waiting to enter material existence.
Cyprian and Danilo followed it as best they could. They rode with sutlers and camp followers, the phantom rolling-stock of military and farm wagons, mostly their own damaged feet, till one day they saw minarets, and Turkish barracks on a hill rising behind an unremarkable town, and that was Kossovska Mitrovitsa.
They boarded a physical or material train and rattled south, shivering with the winter damp, creaking and toppling in and out of sleep, as if drugged, indifferent to food, smoke, alcohol. . . . All the way down through Macedonia, past stations of pilgrimage, finding shrines and sacred places deserted, the wind blowing through, the station platforms desolate, Cyprian was gazed at now and then, though not in any predictable way, from crossing or trackside, in depot archways, as if by comrades-in-arms who had shared an obscurely shameful reverse upon the field of honor—not an outright defeat, but an incentive to withdraw from some engagement offered. Destiny having advanced a pawn, the gambit had been declined, and the despondency of the unsought went moaning in the wires down all the rights-of-way, beneath the Black Mountain of Skoplje, through the city itself, past Mount Vodno, along the valley of the Vardar, through the wine country of the Tikveš Plain, through Demir Kapija, the Iron Gate, and all the way down to the Ægean, to the end of the line, Salonica—where, out of the nicotine and hasheesh mists of the Mavri Gata or Black Cat seamen’s tavern, unaccountably came running a thin young woman with fair hair, who leapt on Danilo, embracing him not only with arms but legs as well, screaming his name over and over.
“This is my cousin,” Danilo mentioned at last, when he had stopped sobbing enough to talk. “Vesna.”
Once, in another life, Cyprian would have replied in his most withering tones, “Of course, charmed I’m sure,” but now he found himself possessed, mouth, eyes and sinuses between, by a smile he could not control. He took her hand. “Your cousin told me his family were here. I’m as happy as he is to see you. Possibly more so.” The relief he felt was enough to make him start crying, too. Nobody noticed.
CYPRIAN AND DANILO had arrived at Salonica to find the city still rever-berating like a struck gong from the events of the preceding spring and summer, when the Turkish sultan had been obliged to restore the constitution, and the insurgents known as the Young Turks had come to power in their country. Since then Salonica had been running on nerve. The city seethed with rudely awakened legions of transient riflemen, as if this ancient scented spill of red roofs, domes, minarets, and cypresses down steep dark hillsides were the flophouse of Europe. Everyone had assumed as written fate that Salonica would fall under Austrian influence—for Vienna dreamed of the Aegean the way Germans dreamed of Paris—when in fact it was the chaste young revolutionaries of Turkey who had already set about re-imagining the place—“Enjoy the skyline while you may,” Danilo all but tearful, “the mosqueless idea of a city is nearly upon us, dull, modern, orthogonal, altogether lacking God’s mystery. You Northern people will feel right at home.”
Down at the port, between the train station and the gas works, in the beer halls and hasheesh bars of the Bara district, the girls were venal and intermittently (but then strikingly) beautiful, the men dressed in flashy white or pearl-colored turnouts and matching shoes whose spotlessness Cyprian understood it would literally be worth his life to compromise or even to comment on aloud.
At the Mavri Gata there was enough hasheesh smoke to confound an elephant. At the end of the room, as if behind an iconostasis of song, oud, baglamas, and a kind of hammered dulcimer called a santouri were being played without a break. The music was feral, Eastern in scale, flatted seconds and sixths, and a kind of fretless portamento between, instantly familiar though the words were in some slurred jailhouse Greek that Danilo confessed to picking up only about one word in ten of. In these nocturnal modalities, “roads,” as the musicians called them, Cyprian heard anthems not of defined homelands but of release into lifelong exile. Roads awaiting the worn sole, the ironbound wheel, and promises of misery on a scale the military staff colleges were only beginning to contemplate.
Vesna was a flame, a brilliant focus of cognizance known in this town as a merakloú. “Tha spáso koúpes,” she sang, “I will smash all the glasses and go out and get drunk because of how you spoke to me. . . .” Knives and pistols appeared from time to time, though some were only for sale. Eligible customers were introduced to sleeping-drafts in their beer and robbed of everything including their socks. Sailors deserted their men-o’-war for street-sparrows who vowed to defy pimp or husband no matter how fatal the consequences. Tough customers in from Constantinople on business sat at tables in the back, smoking out of argilés, counting to themselves without moving their lips, scanning every face that came and went. Their presence (Cyprian was aware by way of Danilo) was not inseparable from the activities of the Young Turkey Party and its Committee of Union and Progress, headquartered here in Salonica. There were things these young idealists needed in the way of matériel, parts of town that must be gone in and out of without molestation, that only “dervish boys” knew how to help with. There were also the Germans, ubiquitously conferring with Committee operatives, too saturated in entitlement to bother with altered identities, simply being German, as if the value of emulation were too obvious to require comment. Albanian children with heaps of koulouria on trays balanced firmly atop perfectly flattened heads came running in and out. Glass broke, cymbals were bashed repeatedly, kombolói clicked in dozens of rhythms, feet stamped along with the music. Women danced the karsilamás together.
“Amán,” Vesna cried, she ululated, “amáaáaáan, have pity, I love you so. . . .”
She sang of longing so deep that humiliation, pain, and danger ceased to matter. Cyprian had left so much emotion behind that it took him all of eight bars to understand that this was his own voice, his life, his slight victory over time, returned to fair limbs and spring sunrises and a heart beating too fiercely for reflection driving him toward what he knew he needed, could not live without. Stin ipochí, as the song, too many of the songs, went—back in that day . . . what had happened? Where was desire, and where was he, who had been almost entirely fashioned of nothing but desire? He regarded the dawn outside the street door, the cyclic fate of one more room-size Creation assembled from scratch through the dark hours one mean blow, petty extortion, fait
hless step at a time, a little world in which a city’s worth of lives witlessly, gleefully, in its entire force, had been invested, as it would be, night after night. It was the absence of all hesitation here that impressed Cyprian, setting aside the ouzo and hasheesh whose molecular products, occupying by now every brain-cell, discouraged careful analysis. It was a world entirely possible to withdraw from angelwise and soar high enough to see more, consider exits from, but nobody here in the smoke and breaking waves of desire wanted exit, the little world would certainly do, perhaps in the way that for some, as one of Vesna’s songs suggested, children, though also small, though comparably doomed, are forever more than enough.
NEWS HAD FILTERED through at last on the status of the annexation crisis and the doings of the great. The German ambassador had met with the Tsar, bringing a personal note from the Kaiser, and shortly after that the Tsar announced that on second thought the annexation of Bosnia would be fine with him after all. The continent relaxed. The Tsar’s decision might have had to do with the recently mobilized German divisions poised at the frontier of Poland, though this was speculation, like everything else at this bottom dead center of the European Question, this bad daydream toward which all had been converging, murderous as a locomotive running without lights or signals, unsettling as points thrown at the last minute, awakened from because of some noise out in the larger world, some doorbell or discontented animal, that might remain forever unidentified.
If Cyprian thought however briefly that now he might be entitled to some relaxation, he was swiftly disabused. One night at the Mavri Gata, Danilo showed up with a noodle-thin and mournful Bulgarian whose name people were either unable to pronounce or remember, or unwilling to utter aloud for fear of certain Greek elements in town. Among the dervisidhes, because of his appearance, he went by the name of Gabrovo Slim.
“It is not the best time to be Bulgarian in Salonica,” he explained to Cyprian. “The Greeks—not these rembetes in here but the politicals who work out of the Greek embassy—want to exterminate us all. They preach in the Greek schools that Bulgaria is the Antichrist. Greek agents work with the Turkish police to make death lists of Bulgarians, and there is a secret society here called ‘The Organization’ whose purpose is to carry out these assassinations.”
“It is about Macedonia, of course.” Cyprian said.
An ancient dispute. Bulgarians had always thought Macedonia was part of Bulgaria, and after the war with Russia so it became at last—for about four months in 1878, till the Treaty of Berlin handded it back to Turkey. The Greeks meanwhile believed it was part of Greece, invoking Alexander the Great, and so forth. Russia, Austria, and Serbia were seeking to extend their influence in the Balkans, and using the Macedonian Question as an excuse. And strangest of all, there were those dominant figures in the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization—the I.M.R.O.—like Gotse Deltchev, who actually believed that Macedonia belonged to the Macedonians themselves, and deserved to be independent of all the powers. “Unfortunately,” Gabrovo Slim said, “I.M.R.O. is split between the Deltchev people and others who are nostalgic for that short-lived ‘Big Bulgaria’ as it was before the Treaty of Berlin.”
“And your own thoughts on the matter?” Cyprian was already chuckling to himself.
“Ha!” They laughed bitterly together for a while till the Bulgarian stopped abruptly. “The Greeks think I’m I.M.R.O., is the problem.”
“Oh dear. And are you?”
“This close.” Gabrovo Slim held forefinger and thumb about a centimeter apart, next to his right ear. “Last night. There have been other attempts, but not quite like that.”
“I told him how we got out of Bosnia,” said Danilo helpfully.
“Oh, I’m the Scarlet Pimpernel, now, is that it?”
“It is your destiny,” declared Vesna, who had been listening.
“Tsoupra mou, you are my destiny.”
“HERE IS THE PLAN,” said Cyprian next evening, at the Café Mazlum down by the Quay, where it seemed the whole town had turned out to hear the great Karakas Effendi sing. “You may have been following the news out of Constantinople, political ferment and whatnot, and noticed that many of our Turkish brothers here in Salonica have begun returning to their capital in anticipation of some effort of larger scale to talk sense to the Sultan. What you’ll do therefore is put on a fez—”
“No. No. I’m an Exarch.”
“Danilo, explain to him.”
“You’ll put on a fez,” explained Danilo, “and, unnoticed in all the Turkish excitability, board a train to The City, and once you get there,” he wrote on a piece of paper and handed it over, “follow your nose to the spice bazaar in Eminönü, just beyond that is the Stamboul quay—you’ll find this slip number and ask to talk to Khalil. There are always Black Sea coasters going to Varna.”
“If I can even get out of Salonica, with all these Organization people watching.”
“We will make sure I.M.R.O. are watching them.”
“Meanwhile,” Cyprian said, “you and I must exchange hats and coats. When I leave here, they’ll think I’m you. Although I must say your garments are not nearly as stylish as what you’re getting in exchange. In case you think there’s not enough sacrifice or something.”
So it was that Cyprian, pretending to be Gabrovo Slim, shifted quarters up the street to a teké called the Pearl of the Bara, and immediately noted an improvement in his weekly budget, owing to a reduced outlay on “black stuff,” as hasheesh was known among the dervish boys, since all he had to do was stand for a minute or two out in the corridor and breathe until Oriental-rug patterns began to writhe across his field of vision in luminous orange and celestial blue.
THOUGH VESNA WAS DEEPLY INVOLVED with a gangster from Smyrna named Dhimitris, she and Cyprian said good-bye as if each were a part of the other. He had no idea why. Danilo looked on with the fatalistic respect of the matchmaker for the laws of chance he must forever struggle with. The boat’s steam-horn blasted out its final admonition.
“You did a good thing,” said Danilo.
“The Bulgarian? I worry about that one, I wonder if he’ll even get that fez on his head.”
“I don’t think he’ll ever forget.”
“The important thing for him,” Cyprian said, “is to be home again, among his people.”
They embraced, but that was the formal version, for their embrace had happened long before.
ON THE WAY BACK TO TRIESTE, Cyprian, having had quite enough of railways for a while, took Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic coasters and mail-steamers, spending as much time as he could chatting, smoking and drinking with the other passengers, as if alone he might be jumped by something unwelcome. As if the linear and the quotidian, adhered to faithfully enough, could save him, save everyone. At Kotor again, for no reason he knew of, he debarked, having decided to pop up and have a quick look at Montenegro. On the road up to Cetinje, he paused at a switchback to look back down at Kotor, and understood how much he had wanted to be exactly here, beholding exactly this lovely innocence of town and harbor betrayed to the interests of war-making, this compassionate denial of the vast cruelty of the late Balkan winter, the sunlight beginning to return each day for a little more than the five hours the mountains and the season had allowed it.
Only to find out that, good God, after a winter of so much hardship and misdirection, Bevis Moistleigh had been holed up in Cetinje with Jacintha Drulov all this time, that the lovestruck young imbecile had actually made his way, in that season of acute European-war hysteria, across an inhospitable terrain disjointed according to ancient tribal hatreds he would never clearly understand, driven by something he thought was love. “Spot of Bosnophobia as well, I shouldn’t wonder,” as Bevis explained airily.
Plum and pomegranate trees were coming into flower, incandescently white and red. The last patches of snow had nearly departed the indigo shadows of north-facing stone walls, and sows and piglets ran oinking cheerfully in the muddy streets. Newly parental swal
lows were assaulting humans they considered intrusive. At a café off Katunska Ulica near the marketplace, Cyprian, sitting across a table from the cooing couple (whose chief distinction from pigeons, he reflected, must be that pigeons were more direct about shitting on one), at great personal effort keeping his expression free of annoyance, was visited by a Cosmic Revelation, dropping from the sky like pigeon shit, namely that Love, which people like Bevis and Jacintha no doubt imagined as a single Force at large in the world, was in fact more like the 333,000 or however many different forms of Brahma worshipped by the Hindu—the summation, at any given moment, of all the varied subgods of love that mortal millions of lovers, in limitless dance, happened to be devoting themselves to. Yes and ever so much luck to them all.
He felt a strange sober joy at the ability, which he seemed to have picked up only recently, to observe himself being annoyed. How odd.
“I say do look at Cyprian, he seems rather stunned.”
“Yes are you quite all right, Cyprian?”
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