Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Now then,” Ratty perhaps recognizing a rhetorical component, “you know you’re the closest thing we have to an Old Balkan Hand.”

  Since the moment in Salonica at the Mavri Gata when he discovered that Danilo’s cousin Vesna, far from a figure of despair and self-delusion, had been altogether real, and that anything was therefore possible again including, and why not, marching off to Constantinople and creating a new world, Cyprian had begun to “relax into his fate,” as he put it. Once he would have been reckoning up, anxiously, how much remained to him of youth, looks, desirability, and whether it would get him at least to the next station of the pilgrimage, but that—he knew now, knew as if with some inner certitude— was no longer quite the point, and in any case would take care of itself. The young and desirable must carry on as they always had, but without little C.L., it seemed.

  Yet anti—Balkan Peninsula vows taken in some heat might after all, it seemed, be modified. “How would we go in?” Cyprian asked, as if interested only in a technical way.

  Ratty nodded and beckoned over a cheerful individual who had been eating bouillabaisse as if he had just received word of some looming fish shortage. “Say hello to Professor Sleepcoat, who will now play you an interesting piece on the piano.”

  The Professor went over to the Pleyel by the window and quickly ran an octave scale on the white keys from F to F. “Recognize that?”

  “Catchy tune,” Cyprian said, “but it’s not quite right, is it.” The Professor started to play it again. “There!”

  “Exactly—it’s this B natural,” banging on it two or three times. “Should be flatted. Once it was actually a forbidden note, you know. You’d get your knuckles rapped for playing it. Worse than that, if it happened to be during the Middle Ages.”

  “So it’s one of the old church modes.”

  “Lydian. In the folk songs and dances of the Balkan villages, as it happens, although the other mediæval modes are well represented, there is this strange and drastic absence of Lydian material—in our own project, to date, we’ve found none at all. Bit of a mystery for us. As if it were still forbidden, perhaps even feared. The interval which our awkwardly unflatted B makes with F was known to the ancients as ‘the devil in the music.’ And whenever we play it for anyone out there, even whistle it, it seems they either run away screaming or assault us physically. What could it be they’re hearing, that’s so unacceptable?”

  “Your plan,” Cyprian guessed, “is to go out there and find the answer to that.”

  “Also to look into some rumors recently of a neo-Pythagorean cult who regard the Lydian with particular horror. Not surprisingly, they tend to favor the so-called Phrygian mode, quite common through the region.” He addressed the keyboard again. “E to E on the white keys. Notice the difference. It happens to coincide with a lyre tuning that some attribute to Pythagoras, and may be traceable all the way back to Orpheus himself, who was a native of Thrace, after all, and was eventually worshipped there as a god.”

  “In view,” added Yashmeen, “of the similarity, if not identity, between Pythagorean and Orphic teachings.”

  The Professor’s eyebrows went up. Yashmeen felt it only fair to mention her former connection with the T.W.I.T.

  “It would be ever so jolly,” pouring a bistro glass brimful of local Jurançon white, “to have an ex-neo-Pythagorean along on this jaunt of ours. Insights as to what the T.W.I.T.’s Balkan counterparts might be thinking and so forth.”

  “If they exist.”

  “Oh, but I believe they do.” Touching her sleeve briefly.

  “Fascination alert,” muttered Cyprian. He and Reef were long familiar with the scenario that developed among those meeting Yashmeen for the first time. Surely as sociable hours rotate and contract to the wee variety, initial fascination, as the evening progressed, would turn gradually to intimidation and bafflement.

  “I’ll be in the bar,” said Reef. Yz-les-Bains was in fact one of the few places on the continent of Europe where a sober Anarchist could find a decent Crocodile—equal amounts of rum, absinthe, and the grape spirits known as trois-six—a traditional Anarchist favorite, which Loïc the bartender, a veteran of the Paris Commune, claimed to have been present at the invention of.

  SO THE IDEA—“whose” idea was a meaningless question around here—was for them to be deployed into Thrace among a party of less than worldly song-gatherers, out late in the European twilight, far from safety, accosting local peasantry and urging them to sing or play something their grandparents had sung or played to them. Though Professor Sleepcoat seemed unconnected to the politics of the day, it had filtered in to him at least that since about 1900, searches for musical material were being undertaken in nations all over Europe, and one certainly could note in his manner an edge of impatience, as if time were running out. “Bartók and Kodály in Hungary, Canteloube in the Auvergne, Vaughan Williams in England, Eugénie Lineff in Russia, Hjalmar Thuren in the Farøe Islands, on it goes, sometimes of course simply because it’s possible, given the recent improvements in portable sound recording.” But there was also an urgency abroad which no one in the field would speak of, as if somehow the work had to be done quickly, before each people’s heritage of song was somehow lost for good.

  “I’ll be the outrider I guess,” Reef said, “though it wouldn’t hurt you two to be checked out on some kind of personal hardware, just for back-covering purposes—and Cyprian, you’ll be doing the navigating, and Yash, why I expect there’s some kinda chores we could find for you. . . .”

  Before becoming familiar with Reef’s ideas of affectionate teasing, Yashmeen once would have reliably flown into full wet-hen indignation at talk like this. Now she only smiled formally and said, “Actually I happen to be the true beating heart of this mission.” Which was so. Reef was running as always on what, except for its lack of analysis, would’ve been class hostility, but usually had more to do with how some suit-wearing bastard happened to’ve looked at him that day. Cyprian was absolutely without political faith—if it couldn’t be turned into a quip, it wasn’t worth considering. Yashmeen certainly was the one who shared most deeply the Anarchist beliefs around here. She had no illusions about bourgeois innocence, and yet held on to a limitless faith that History could be helped to keep its promises, including someday, a commonwealth of the oppressed.

  It was her old need for some kind of transcendence—the fourth dimension, the Riemann problem, complex analysis, all had presented themselves as routes of escape from a world whose terms she could not accept, where she had preferred that even erotic desire have no consequences, at least none as weighty as the desires for a husband and children and so forth seemed to be for other young women of the day.

  But lovers could not in general be counted as transcendent influences, and history had gone on with its own relentless timetable. Now at Yz-les-Bains, though, Yashmeen wondered if she hadn’t found some late reprieve, some hope of passing beyond political forms to “planetary oneness,” as Jenny liked to put it. “This is our own age of exploration,” she declared, “into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we’ve seen. What are any of these ‘utopian dreams’ of ours but defective forms of time-travel?”

  AFTER A SEND-OFF party that went on all night, to be remembered for an innocence in which everything was still untouched by cause and effect, they came out into a stormy dawn and walked together arm in arm the slick cobbles of the little streets, under pedestrian bridges and up and down sets of steps in the wet light to their rooms to try and catch a few hours’ sleep before departure for the Peninsula.

  Then they were on the train as the points were thrown one by one, like a magician forcing a card on spectators not sure how much they wanted to be fooled, for this time down the tracks none of them was finding any way to enjoy the usual tourist’s suspension of disbelief before a vari
ety performance, it was no longer “travel,” really, but three kinds of necessity.

  And it was not the sights out the windows of wintry speeding Europe so much as the fucking that went on when the sleeping-carriage shades were drawn. The old Orient Express fantasy available on any given night in Europe at a music-hall somewhere.

  Outside Zagreb, as if she could sense something wheeling to a close, Yashmeen, her beautiful ass elevated for Reef, who had just entered her, beckoned Cyprian over and without preliminaries, for the first time, took his penis, already achingly erect, into her mouth.

  “Oh I say Yashmeen, really that isn’t—”

  She paused, disengaging her mouth for a moment, and glared at him affectionately. “Pregnancy makes a woman do strange things,” she explained. “Indulge me,” and recommenced sucking and, to his great delight, biting too, at first gently but then with increasing severity, so that it was not long before Cyprian was climaxing awed through this artfully calibrated pain, with Reef, aroused by the sight, not far behind, hollering “Whoopee!” as he was known to do. “Yes I should imagine,” Cyprian added, nearly breathless.

  “The rule,” she reminded him when it seemed he was about to bring up the matter of roles and “places” later approaching Beograd, “is that there are no rules.” At about which point, by accident, of course, Cyprian happened to catch Reef’s eye.

  “Don’t get any ’cute ideas,” Reef said, immediately brusque.

  “Well you do have an appealing bottom,” Cyprian mused, “in an abbreviated, muscular sort of way. . . .”

  “Damn,” Reef shaking his head, “there goes my appetite. You two figure somethin out, I’m going down that smokin salon, grab me a cheroot.”

  “There’s ever such a nice panatela right here,” Cyprian couldn’t help remarking, “all ready for you.”

  “That? why, that ain’t even a Craven A.” And Reef stalked out, not nearly as annoyed as he was pretending to be. For Yash was right, of course. No rules. They were who they were, was all. For a while now, anytime he and Yash happened to be fucking face-to-face, she would manage to reach around and get a finger, hell, maybe even two sometimes, up in there, and he guessed it wasn’t always that bad. And to be honest he did wonder now and then how it might be if Cyprian fucked him for a change. Sure. Not that it had to happen, but then again . . . it was shooting pool, he supposed, you had the straight shots, and cuts and English that went with that, but around these two you also had to expect caroms, and massés, and surprise balls out the corner of your eye coming back at you to collide at unforeseen angles, off of cushions sometimes you hadn’t even thought about, heading for pockets you’d never’ve called. . . .

  And the fact was that Reef, for all the chattering and silly ways, had grown really fond of the kid. He had ridden with men, no-foolin-around 100-percent machos that were a hell of a lot more trouble to get along with. Touchy, sentimental about the damndest things, cantina music, animal stories, badmen pimping their wives with tears in their eyes as they took the money, spend any time at all in company like this and either you develop a vast patience or become violent.

  What surprised him about the three of them together—what he couldn’t understand really—was that he kept waiting to feel jealous about something, having a personal history himself of purely mean sumbitch ways when it came to these third-party situations, he couldn’t tell you how many nights a lamp going out behind a window curtain or some glimpse of two heads together in a buggy half a mile away had sent him into some homicidal seizure. Waking up in some barrelhouse with vomit all in his hair and not always his own vomit, either. But among the three of them something was different, jealousy hadn’t ever figured into it, in some way never could. Once he would’ve thought, well of course, how could a man ever get jealous of a creampuff like Cyprian? But as he got to know him better, Reef saw how Cyprian could handle himself when he had to, and it wasn’t all to do with that Webley Reef knew he was packing. Once or twice, unexpectedly, he’d seen Cyprian drop the pose of theatrical hysteria he used to get through the working day on, and emerge into a region of cool self-control—you could see him straighten up and begin to breathe deliberately, as professional lurkers in the shadows outside casinos, waiting for the incautious and self-satisfied, faded away muttering, or flâneurs commenting in dialect had fallen silent, lost their grins, believing that Cyprian had understood every word, and not looking forward to how personally he might want to take it.

  IN BEOGRAD THEY JOINED UP with Professor Sleepcoat and his party, which included the technician Enrico, the student volunteers Dora and Germain, and an accountant named Gruntling who was there at the University’s insistence owing to budget overruns on the last trip out here, most of them in a column titled “Miscellaneous” whose details Professor Sleepcoat could somehow not recall.

  At Sofia they all descended to the platform of the Tsentralna Gara to find a city re-imagined in the thirty-odd years since the Turks had been driven out, winding alleyways, mosques, and hovels replaced with a grid of neat wide streets and Europeanized public works on the grand scale. As they rode into town, Cyprian stared in dismay at the Boulevard Knyaginya Mariya Luiza, which seemed to be full of stray dogs and serious drinkers in different stages of alcohol poisoning.

  “It used to be much worse,” the Professor assured him. “Arthur Symons called it the most horrible street in Europe, but that was ages ago, and we all know how sensitive Arthur is.”

  “Kind of like Omaha,” it seemed to Reef.

  The next day Gruntling went to the bank and stayed till closing time, and then the party headed north, up into the hills.

  Each morning the accountant took a sack of silver Bulgarian leva and counted out twenty-five of them. “This is only a quid,” objected the Professor. “All right,” said Gruntling, handing him the coins, “then that makes this a ‘quo.’ Try not to spend it all in one place.”

  “It’s five dollars,” Reef said, “I don’t know what he’s complaining about.” Most of the outlays were in smaller coins, nickel and bronze stotinki, for meals usually on the run—kebabcheta, banichka, palachinki, beer—and someplace to doss in the evenings. For a few stotinki, one could also find a child eager to turn the crank that ran the recording device by way of reduction gears and a flywheel that smoothed out variations in pitch. “Like pumping the bellows of a church organ back in the last century,” it seemed to Professor Sleepcoat. “Without all those anonymous urchins we wouldn’t have had Bach.” Which got him a look from Yashmeen, who in other circs might’ve inquired sweetly how much of Western culture throughout history did he think might actually have depended on that sort of shamefully under-paid labor. But it was not a discussion anybody had the leisure to get into any longer.

  One nightfall the Professor was out working late, when from up the valley he heard someone singing in a young tenor voice, which at first he took for a typical Transylvanian swineherd’s kanástánc that had found its way here somehow seeping over ridgelines and fanning down watersheds. But presently another young voice in a higher range, a girl’s, answered, and for the duration of the twilight the two voices sang back and forth across the little valley, sometimes antiphonal, sometimes together in harmony. They were goatherds, and the words were in Shop dialect sung to a Phrygian melody he had never heard before, and knew he would never hear again, not this way, unmediated and immune to Time. Because what he could make out were words only the young had any right to sing, he was unavoidably reminded of the passing of his own youth, gone before he’d had a chance to take note of it, and thus was able to hear lying just beneath an intense awareness of loss, as if the division between the singers were more than the width of a valley, something to be crossed only through an undertaking at least as metaphysical as song, as if Orpheus might once have sung it to Eurydice in Hell, calling downward through intoxicant fumes, across helically thundering watercourses, echoing among limestone fantastically sculptured over unnumbered generations by Time personified as a demiurge and servan
t of Death— And the recording equipment, of course, and Enrico, were back at the inn. Not that any recording was necessary, really, for the two singers had repeated the song often enough, well into the onset of the night, for it to enter into the grooves of Professor Sleepcoat’s memory, right next to the ones dedicated to regrets and sorrows and so forth.

  Later the Professor seemed to have Orpheus on the brain. “He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe in her desire to come back with him to live in the upper world again. He had to turn around and look, just to make sure she was coming.”

  “Typical male insecurity,” Yashmeen sniffed.

  “Typical female lust for wealth wins out in the end, is the way I always read that one,” commented Gruntling.

  “Oh he’s the Lord of Death, for goodness’ sake, there’s no money over there.”

  “Young woman, there is money everywhere.”

  THE MAIN TASK for Reef, Cyprian, and Yashmeen right now was locating the Interdikt line, and disabling it. The countryside was full of hints, deliberate misdirections—any mirage of something unnaturally straight, shimmering across the terrain, could send them off on fools’ errands to waste the precious hours. Townspeople were friendly enough until Cyprian brought out the map—then they shifted their eyes away and even began to tremble, conferring in dialects suddenly gone opaque. The use of such terms as “fortification” and “gas” was hardly productive, even with those untroubled enough to stop and chat. “You don’t look for them,” they were often warned—“if they want to, they find you. Better if they don’t find you.” At the fringes of these discussions, the good folk were averting their faces, repeatedly and compulsively crossing themselves, and making other hand-gestures less familiar, some indeed quite complicated, as if overlain, since ancient days, with manual commentary.