Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Somehow, because his description of Dally had included her celebrated red hair—a feature widely associated with the traveling companions of Basil Zaharoff—her would-be abductors Imi and Ernö had fallen under the impression, as they boarded the Orient Express at Szeged and made their way, stealthy as operetta pirates, both wearing peculiar black Central European Trilby hats, toward Dally’s compartment, that this was to be the kidnapping of a Zaharoff girl, for whom the international arms tycoon would pay a tidy sum in ransom money.

  Kit Traverse, meanwhile, was sitting in a Wagons-Lits train headed the other way, toward Paris, which according to schedule should’ve been rolling into Buda-Pesth about now, except for a slow start owing to mysterious revolutionary activities on the line, so that both his train and Dally’s happened to arrive at the same time in Szeged. Kit looked out the window and observed across the tracks in the train opposite a presentable redhead in some kind of trouble. There might still be five or ten minutes to just stroll over there and see what was what.

  “ZAHAROFF GIRL!”

  “No—who, me?”

  “Zaharoff girl! Red hair! Look!”

  “Suggest you get them meathooks out of my hair,” said Dally.

  The two looked at each other as if they might have to consider some remote possibility of error. A moment of thought processes ensued.

  “Zaharoff girl!” they started screaming again.

  “Fellas,” Kit Traverse in the doorway beaming, “think you may have the wrong compartment here?”

  “That can’t be you out there,” said Dally.

  Kit made out a young woman in a smart traveling ensemble, sunlight streaming in the train window behind her, lighting up her hatless hair. He focused in till he was sure of who he was seeing. “Well.”

  The 7.62 mm Nagant tucked in his belt had not escaped the attention of either Imi or Ernö, who began quickly to adjust their demeanor to suggest mental soundness.

  “This is Compartment Number Seven, yes?”

  “So far so good.”

  “Always reserved for Zaharoff úr, and his esteemed lovely Zaharoff girls. You are coming from Vienna?”

  “No,” said Dally.

  “Zaharoff girls always board at Vienna.”

  “Well now see that’s just it—”

  “Imi, Crouchmas úr did say ‘Zaharoff girl,’ didn’t he?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “You,” Imi turning to Kit, “are Mr. Zaharoff? Crouchmas úr told us you would be somewhere else.”

  “Clive Crouchmas sent you two? Why that miserable toad,” declared Dally.

  “Now then, Fönök,” Ernö in a confidential voice, pretending to draw Kit to one side, “say that we wanted to buy a submarine . . .”

  Quick as that Imi had a little FN Browning in his hand. “Bocsánat.”

  “First of all I am not Basil Zaharoff the well-known merchant of death, and this is not a Zaharoff girl but in fact my wife Euphorbia, yes and we are planning to spend our honeymoon in Constantinople, the British War Office were kind enough to make available to us this accommodation, which is vacant this week owing to Mr. Z. as you already pointed out being elsewhere—”

  The chef de brigade stuck his head in about then, and all weapons abruptly vanished. “Madame . . . messieurs? We shall be pulling out shortly.” He saluted, allowing himself a quizzical stare at everybody.

  “You gentlemen’ll excuse me for a moment I’m sure,” Dally herding them all like chickens out into the corridor.

  “We’ll be playing a little kalabriás in the smoking salon,” advised Ernö. “We’d like to resolve this before we reach Porta Orientalis.”

  “You’ve got the wrong folks,” sang Kit wearily. “Ask around—the chief, the conductors, ask anybody.”

  “If you have bribed them,” Imi pointed out, “we can always pay more than you.”

  “Not if I’m really Basil Zaharoff,” Kit, resisting the urge to wink, ducked away down the corridor. As a logical puzzle, it might not have passed muster at Göttingen, but here it might buy him five minutes, and that was all he needed.

  He jumped off Dally’s train in time to see his own disappearing down the tracks in the general direction of Paris, France, so it seemed he would be here in—what was the name of this place?—Szeged, for a while.

  Years later they would be unable to agree on how they found themselves on the Széchenyi-Tér tramline, fleeing into the heart of the city. Kit knew that this was the sort of story grandfathers told to grandchildren, usually so that there could then be a grandmother’s version, more practical and less inclined to grant slack. . . . Which is to say that what Kit recalled was running a perilous evasive action while squads of homicidal Hungarians, notable for their stature and eagerness for gunplay, kept appearing at unexpected moments during the escape—while Dally remembered only shifting quickly into a sturdier pair of boots and packing a few necessities in a satchel, which she threw down to Kit and jumped after onto the tracks with the train already rolling out of the station, and took his hand, and off they went. It wouldn’t be till Kiskúnfélegyháza an hour down the line that Imi and Ernö would notice that the young couple were missing.

  As they ran across the tracks, their hearts were pounding. They both agreed on that.

  Kit as a matter of fact was already on the run. He had been living in Constantinople, tending bar at the Hôtel des Deux Continents, off the Grande Rue over on the European or honkytonk side of the Golden Horn in Pera, long enough almost to’ve come to believe his life had found its equilibrium at last. Folks out here talked about fate, but for Kit it was a matter of stillness.

  It had taken him a while, from Kazakh Upland to Kirghiz Steppe to Caspian Depression, short hops in little steamers along the Anatolian coast, the invisible City ahead of him gripping him ever more surely in its field, as he felt the weight of reverence, of history, the nervous bright edge of revolution, around the final cape and into the Bosphorus, the palaces and small harbors and mosques and ship traffic, beneath the Galata Tower, docking at last at Eminönü.

  PERA WAS A CONSUMMATE BORDER TOWN, a little state, a microcosm of the two continents, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Persians, Germans up to their mischief. Since the dramatic march of the “Army of Freedom” from Salonica to Constantinople to put down the Sultan’s threatened counterrevolution, things had been hopping, both at the Pera Palace bar and, on a less exalted level, at the Deux Continents. Though the Committee of Union and Progress had declared itself no longer a secret organization, the intriguing, hasheesh conspiracies and back-alley beatings and murders went on as always.

  Ottomanists, nationalists, and pan-Islamics within the C.U.P. struggled for power, and outside it strikers, komitadji, socialists, and dozens of other factions each pursued its claim to a piece of the New Turkey. All showed up at the Deux Continents sooner or later.

  It being too much to expect arms dealers to ignore this sort of thing, who should Kit find himself concocting a Champagne cocktail for one evening but the distinguished Viktor Mulciber, last seen in an estaminet in Ostend five or six years ago. He was using a different pomade on his hair, one even less subtle, if possible, than before, filling incalculable cubic feet of otherwise-tolerable space with its chemically floral miasma. It became clear that Viktor remembered Kit more as an engineer than a mathematician. “What is it that keeps you here? You like the city? Is it a girl? A Greek bathhouse boy? The local hasheesh?”

  “Keep going,” Kit shrugged.

  “Right now, for engineers, it seems to be a seller’s market. Aviation in particular. You have any background in that?”

  “Göttingen. Hung around some at Dr. Prandtl’s shop at the Applied Mechanics Institute. All pretty theoretical.”

  “Any aircraft concern in the world would simply hand you a blank check, get down on its knees, and beg in the most humiliating way possible that you name your price.”

  Well, the man was a drummer, though what he was trying to sell Kit
was unclear. “Anybody in particular?”

  “Since the air show in Brescia last year, Italy seems to be the place. Pilots like Calderara and Cobianchi are designing their own machines, auto factories and bicycle-makers are getting into the business.” He wrote an address on the back of one of his cards. “This is in Turin, a good place to start.”

  “Mighty kind of you, sir.”

  “No need to grovel, lad, there’s a finder’s fee, and it’s good for business.”

  Kit would ordinarily have pocketed and lost the card, and gone on with his life in the City, in oscillation between Europe and Asia, comfortable as a slow flap of wings, except for what happened a few nights later. Headed home after his shift at the Deux Continents, he was passing a meyhane, a roomful of drunks and a Gypsy band audible from inside, when suddenly in a burst of resinous smoke a young man came flying through the doorway into Kit’s path, nearly knocking him over. After him came three others, two with drawn pistols, one large enough not to need one. Kit had no idea who was who, but by some ancient reflex to do with the odds, which didn’t appeal to him much, he drew his Nagant, distracting the trio long enough to allow their target to slip away down a narrow vaulted passage. The two pistol-packers went chasing off after him—the third stood gazing. “We know where you work,” he said at last in English. “You have stepped into the wrong argument. Be very careful now.”

  Next evening somebody picked his pocket. Seriously deranged street apes took to leaping out at him from unsuspected angles. Politissas who used to roll their eyes his way found excuses to look elsewhere. One night Jusuf the manager took him aside.

  “The man whose life you thought you saved the other night,” he said, and made an eloquent gesture of finality. “He was an enemy of the C.U.P. Now you are, too.” He handed Kit a wad of Turkish pounds and a train ticket as far as Buda-Pesth. “Best I can do. Would you mind leaving your recipe for the cocktail you invented?”

  “‘Love in the Shadows of Pera,’” Kit said. “It’s just Creme de Menthe and beer.” Next thing he knew here he was in Szeged up to the same hollow heroics. Except for Dally, of course.

  Not sure who was after them or, in Kit’s case, why, they kept on the move till they had found their way past the city limits, along a little irrigation canal, lined with willows and into a paprika field.

  “Where were you headed for anyway?” she got around to asking. “Paris? England?”

  “Italy,” Kit said. “Venice.”

  In the instant she remembered the promise she’d more or less inveigled him into making year before last sometime, but she didn’t quite dare to bring it up now. Seeing how she hadn’t exactly waited for him. What’d she been thinking of, leaving Venice? she must’ve been crazy. He was looking at her as if to say—and then, what do you know, he did say, “You don’t remember, I bet.”

  She pretended to gaze at the paprika fields ripening to a red no match for her hair—or lips, for that matter (it was occurring now to Kit)—and tried to think back to the last time she’d felt so wobbly on her feet. “Course I remember.”

  They were already too close not to turn and slide into an embrace smooth as the solution to a puzzle. There in the silence before the clamoring weeks of harvest would take over the fields, with the pepper pods stirring audibly in the hot lowland breezes, they found to no one’s surprise but their own how far ahead of them their bodies had been, how impatient with the minds that had been keeping them apart.

  “If this is a bad idea, I mean, your dress in all this dirt—”

  “Oh, it’s terrific dirt,” she informed him between kisses, “feels good, smells good . . . look at all these peppers here, they love it . . . it’ll wash out, why are you even . . . oh, Kit . . .”

  Who by now, his pants down and his shoes still on, had entered, and reentered, and so forth, and the cycle, now exclusively theirs, wet, high, and headlong, whirled away from time as other less-urgent lovers might have known it, until presently, calm for the moment, refusing ever to uncouple, they lay in warm semirefuge from the midday sun, in the light and shade between the rows of low plants and the smell of the earth.

  When she remembered how to talk, “Where’ve you been, Siberia or someplace?”

  “As a matter of fact . . .”

  “Tell me later.”

  They got as far as a little grove of acacias before they had to start kissing, and presently fucking, again. “Must be all this paprika,” Kit speculated.

  Then somehow they were back in Szeged and booking into a three-and-a-half-kroner room at the Grand-Hôtel Tisza.

  “For young English újházaspár,” loudly announced Miklós the desk clerk, ignoring all the agricultural smudges and handing over a pair of tickets, “compliments of this Hotel! Wonderful show tonight at the Varosi Színház! The incomparable Béla Blaskó, our famous actor from Lugos, singing and dancing in a new operetta straight from Vienna! If only you had been here last week to see Béla as Romeo”—producing a local newspaper and opening it to the theater review—“look, they said ‘fiery . . . passionately loving . . .’ but—no need to tell you two, eh?”

  “Well,” Kit demurred.

  “Oh, c’mon,” Dally said mischievously, “it’ll be fun.”

  As it turned out, it was a pretty good show, though they didn’t quite catch the whole thing. They did make sure to have an early supper beforehand, just up the riverside promenade from the Színház at the Café-Restaurant Otthon. Instead of a menu, a telepathic waiter named Pityu brought them wine and bread and bowls filled with some miraculous combination of fish, paprika, and green peppers.

  “This can’t just be soup,” she said, “what on earth is it?”

  “Hálaszlé,” said Pityu, “only here in Szeged, three kinds of fish, all just pulled out of the river there.”

  “And you knew—”

  “I know everything,” he laughed, “or maybe it is nothing, my English gets strange sometimes. But your friends Imi and Ernö have gone back to Buda-Pesth, so you don’t have to worry about them at least.”

  “Then you must know I’m not a Zaharoff girl either,” said Dally, exercising her eyelashes.

  “My mother, who still lives in Temesvár, would say your destiny is much more demanding than that.”

  THE OPERETTA, all the rage in Vienna at the moment, was called The Burgher King, in which the ruler of a fictional country in Central Europe, feeling disconnected from his people, decides to go out among them disguised as a member of the urban middle class.

  “Why not as a peasant, Your Highness? a Gypsy, maybe a laborer?”

  “One requires a certain level of comfort, Schleppingsdorff. If one spent one’s whole day working and sleeping, there would be no time for observation, let alone thought . . . would there.”

  Notable among the jolly drinking songs and sentimental love ballads was the rousing waltz which had rapidly become an anthem for Viennese window-shoppers—

  Machen wir ein-en Schaufen-sterbum-mel,

  Ü-berwerfen sie irgendwas Fum-mel, auf

  Straßen und Gassen, lass uns nur lauf-en

  Al-les anstarren, aber nichts kauf-en. . . .

  On one of these merry show-window strolls, the camouflaged monarch meets and falls in love with a horrible little bourgeoise, Heidi, who of course happens to be married. Royal advisers fly into a panic in the form of a trio, sung molto agitato. One of them, Schleppingsdorff, decides to disguise himself as well and pretend to romance the soubrette, the H.L.B.’s best friend, Mitzi. Unfortunately, it is Heidi with whom Schleppingsdorff is immediately fascinated, while Mitzi, already obsessed with the Burgher King, goes through the motions of returning Schleppingsdorff’s attentions, just so she can be close to the B.K. and pounce at the first sign of trouble, which she tries to bring about by encouraging Schleppingsdorff in his pursuit of Heidi. Meanwhile the comic basso, the husband, Ditters, runs to and fro trying to figure out what his wife is up to, quite soon becoming insane from the effort. It is all great fun.

 
The first act closed with young Béla Blaskó, playing the Burgher King, wearing a silk hat at a rakish angle and twirling a cane, in front of a corps of dancers and singers performing the peppy

  No need for feel-ing so down,

  Just spend a night-on-the-town,

  That-Dan-ube won’t, look-so blue—

  not if you do, like I do—

  Just get on out-to-the ucca,

  Take a stroll up—the a-ve-nue,

  You’ll find that ci-ty beat puts-a

  —Synco-pation in-your shoe,

  Find-one-of-those

  Austro-Hun-gar-i-an ladies,

  So super-ficially deep,

  Down where the gi-golos creep,

  Too full of rhyth-m to sleep,

  All-you-need’s-a

  Good-time girl from the K and K,

  Who can’t tell you if it’s night or day,

  And slip away on a cruise, from

  Those Austro-Hungarian blues!

  Which by the first-act curtain had Dally mesmerized into some peculiar wide-eyed state.

  “Ain’t like I never saw a charming leading man before, seen ’em come and go, but this lad is the goods, I tell you—and Hungarian, too!”

  Kit guessed so. “But what’s with that piece of business where he bites old Heidi’s neck, what was that all about?”

  “Something they do in these parts? You’re the one with the college education.” Her look just short of what you’d call innocent.

  Kit peered back, trying to resist the nitwit smile that was about to take over his face. “Well, hard to say, you know, my Hungarian being a little rusty and all, but . . . didn’t it look to you like that she was, sort of . . . going for it?”

  “What. Having her neck bitten.” Slipping she was sure she didn’t know why into her country-weekend mode of English accent.

  “Well here, let’s just—”