Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  The hegumen seemed to recognize her from a previous metempsychosis. “The mooned planet,” said the hegumen, “the planetary electron. If self-similarity proves to be a built-in property of the universe, then perhaps sleep is, after all, a form of death—repeated at a daily frequency instead of a generational one. And we go back and forth, as Pythagoreans suspected, in and out of death as we do dreams, but much more slowly. . . .”

  WITH NO RESOURCES to express his feelings to Cyprian, Reef settled for practical planning. “Figure on heading west, through the mountains, to the Adriatic coast. Any hot springs, hotel de luxes up that way you could recommend?”

  “It depends how far north you’re planning to go. I never got south of Montenegro. Oh, but you might want this.”

  It was the Webley-Fosbery .38 that had seen him through Bosnia and the years since.

  Reef pretended to look it over. “Nice little iron. Sure you wouldn’t like to hang on to this?”

  “What for? Brides of Night don’t carry service revolvers in their kit.”

  “I could think of one or two developments. . . .”

  “But, Reef.” A hand on his shoulder. “That’s what you mustn’t do.” The two men looked in each other’s eyes, for longer than either could remember doing.

  CYPRIAN CAME WITH THEM as far as the river. Above them cloud had begun to enfold the convent and the church, as if denying them second thoughts. The morning seemed to be darkening toward some Balkan equivalent of Transfiguration.

  She handed Ljubica to Cyprian, and he held her ceremonially, and kissed her loudly on her stomach as always, and as always she squealed. “Don’t remember me,” he advised her. “I’ll see to all the remembering.” Back in Yash’s arms, she beamed at him calmly, and he knew he had only minutes before regret would force him into a mistake of some kind. “Go safely. Try to stay out of Albania.”

  As if seized by something ancient, Yashmeen cried, “Please—don’t look back.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.”

  “I’m serious. You mustn’t. I beg you, Cyprian.”

  “Or he’ll take you below, you mean. Down to America.”

  “Always makin with em jokes,” Reef in a hollow chuckle.

  And none of them looked back, not even Ljubica.

  And Cyprian was taken behind a great echoless door.

  FOR DAYS Reef and Yashmeen each latched into a separate sorrow, couldn’t even talk about it. Reef gave up his restless scouting of likely honky-tonks, and when evening came and the gray light fell like fine ash, he only sat heartbroken, indoors preferably, by a window, holding the baby sometimes. Being in her own partial vacuum, Yashmeen knew of no way to chirp him out of it.

  “I didn’t see it coming,” Reef said finally, “but I guess you did.”

  “It wasn’t us,” she said. “Nothing we did. Nothing we should have done.”

  “Don’t say ‘he must’ve loved God more’n us,’ is all.”

  “No because I don’t think that’s true.” She was all ready to start crying then.

  “I mean God don’t normally run up and bite people on the ass, but if he did, see—”

  “Reef. Cyprian loved us. He still does.”

  Somehow neither saw much further point in going to the Black Sea coast. They turned and headed west. One evening Reef came in to find Yashmeen sitting distraught by a pile of Cyprian’s discarded clothing, picking up item after item. “I could pretend to be him for you,” she cried, not loud enough to wake Ljubica, the hopefulness in her voice more than he knew how to respond to, “I could wear his shirts, his trousers, you could tear them off, and take my arse and fuck my mouth, and imagine that he’s . . .”

  “Darlin . . . please. . . . That ain’t goin to do it. . . .” Too damn close to tears himself if you really wanted to know.

  He had begun to hold her with a tenderness she had seen before this only when he held Ljubica. I am not his child, she protested, but to herself, even as she settled further into his embrace.

  THEY MADE THEIR WAY up off the Plain of Thrace, into the Rhodopes and then the Pirin range, over toward Macedonia. Some days the light was pitiless. Light so saturated with color, brought hovering to such tension, that it could not be borne for long, as if it were dangerous to be out in country filled with light like this, as if anyone beneath it were just about to be taken by it, if not over into death then some transformation at least as severe. Light like this must be received with judgment—too much, too constantly, would exhaust the soul. To move through it would be to struggle against time, the flow of the day, the arbitrarily assigned moment of darkness. Sometimes Reef wondered if maybe somebody hadn’t triggered that Interdikt after all, and this was the residue from it. . . .

  In mid-October, after declaring war against Turkey, divisions of the Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian armies invaded Macedonia, and by the twenty-second, fighting between Serbians and Turks was heavy around Kumanovo, in the north. Meanwhile Bulgarian forces were pressing south toward the Turkish border and Adrianople just beyond.

  Each day then would show Reef, Yash, and Ljubica only a further narrowing of choices, as they were pressed by the movements of forces toward the west and south. Rumors were everywhere, a storm of fearful hearsay from gatherings at street-corners and well-heads. . . . “It’s what we were sent out here to stop,” Yashmeen said. “This must mean that we failed, and the assignment is over.”

  “The job now’s just to get out of here,” Reef figured. He began to spend time each morning at whatever mehana, crossroads, or other gathering place might be handy, trying to pick up what news he could and figure the safest direction to be heading in. “Is they’re comin in from all directions, is the problem here, Serbs from the north, Greeks from the south, Bulgarians from the east. Turks on the run everyplace, shouldn’t last long, but what a commotion.”

  “So we keep heading west.”

  “Only choice. Try and scoot between the armies. Then, if we get that far, worry about that Albania.”

  THE FIGHTING had been moving obliquely away from them, from Philippopolis, toward the Turkish border and Adrianople. They crept south, in the partial vacuum, behind Ivanoff’s Second Army, which was on the right of the general advance.

  They crossed over into Macedonia. Even the crows were silent now. Heading west through Strumica and Valandovo, they found the pomegranate orchards full of refugees, and they kept on into the valley of the Vardar beyond, and the Tikveš wine country, where the harvest had just been brought in.

  ACCORDING TO RUMOR the Serbians had defeated the Turks at Kumanovo, but had been slow in following up their advantage. The countryside was filled with Turkish soldiers either cut off from their units or in flight, all looking deeply unhappy, many wounded, some about to die. Monastir was said to be a Serbian objective now, which meant there would be fighting to the westward as well.

  Reef took to scavenging weapons wherever he could, field-issue and hunting pieces, Mausers and Mannlichers as well as more ancient firearms, some with Arabic inscriptions or trimmed with elk-horn or boar-tusk ivory, ammunition of all calibers from 6.5 to 11 mm, sometimes discovered in abandoned encampments, more and more often taken from the dead, who had begun to appear in increasing numbers, like immigrants into a country where they were feared, disliked, pitilessly exploited.

  As the landscape turned increasingly chaotic and murderous, the streams of refugees swelled. Another headlong, fearful escape of the kind that in collective dreams, in legends, would be misremembered and reimagined into pilgrimage or crusade . . . the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope ahead, the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national, delusion. Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too awful to face, thriving, emerging in disguise, vigorous, evil, destructive, inextricable.

  “THERE’S FIGHTING out ahead of us now, so best we step careful,” Reef reported. Each day brought them closer to the horizon of the unimaginable. All Europe could be at war by now. Nobody knew.

&n
bsp; When Ljubica heard her first explosions from up in the mountains to the northwest, between Veles and Prilep, though she hadn’t been sleeping, she seemed to wake from wakefulness, her eyes widening, and let out a laugh, “Which from an older child,” her mother trying not to be too offended, “one must describe as uproarious.”

  “Gets it from her grandpa,” Reef nodded, “dynamite baby. In the blood.”

  “Glad to see you both enjoying yourselves. Could we try not to get caught in any of this?”

  A major battle was shaping up, and Reef, Yash, and Ljubica happened to be heading into its rear areas. They joined processions across the plains, between stagnant ditches, farm carts pushed and pulled by younger sons, piled with furniture that would end up being burned for warmth as the days grew colder and the terrain higher, dogs in unending negotiation over what was guarded and what fair targets, forming temporary packs to gang likely sheep, scattering at the arrival of the flock’s own sheepdog. Krupp guns thumping in the distance, village crones wandering the hillsides, the constant birds of prey patrolling the sky.

  After being defeated at Kumanovo, three Turkish army corps had fled south, toward the fortified city of Monastir, one of the last Turkish bastions in Europe, pursued by the Serbian First Army, whose orders were to finish them off. While the Sixth Corps went directly to Monastir, the Fifth and Seventh deployed in the mountains just to the north to engage and try to slow the Serbian forces coming down by way of Kičevo and Prilep. A stretch of mountain fighting followed, notably at the Babuna Pass above Prilep.

  ONE MORNING AT FIRST LIGHT they awoke into a firefight the likes of which few out here had ever encountered and would never have expected in this antiquated world of bolt-action weaponry. Among the frantic popping of Mauser against Mauser, something new on Earth. Machine guns, the future of warfare. Russian Madsen guns and a few Montenegrin Rexers. It was the devastation and final descent of the Ottoman project, the centuries of Turkey in Europe, the last garrisons falling one by one. . . .

  “What is it?” she whispered, holding the baby tightly to her.

  “Oh just some bees, darlin,” Reef affecting the roguish smile that apparently would never fail him. “Serbian bumblebees, just be sure and keep your heads down.”

  “Oh,” going along with it, not that there was much choice at the moment, “that’s all.” Ljubica was trembling but quiet, as if determined not to cry.

  “You got that Webley someplace handy, am I right?” trying not to holler too loud. Only if they get close enough, he had said, when he gave it to her. Otherwise we’re fine. Was it going to be close enough this time?

  Troops were running by screaming, whether in panic terror or battle cry, whether Serbian or Turk, nobody was about to look out there and see.

  Howitzer shells started dropping nearby. Not a sustained barrage, but it would only take one.

  “Once they get their line and length,” she said, “we may have to vacate the premises.”

  “I think,” said Reef, “you mean ‘range and bearing,’ darlin.”

  “A cricketing term,” she explained. “I once played briefly at Girton a million years ago. My secret dream was always to play for a team of nomads like I Zingari. . . .”

  It had become their practice to adopt this style of chitchat during moments of danger. Whether it fooled Ljubica for a minute was debatable, but it kept Reef and Yash occupied. Like the terrible footfalls of an invisible angel, the blasts were coming closer. Presently the shells were visible, rising and falling slowly and steeply out in the monochrome autumn, each time descending with a harsh, buzzing shriek. Finally one landed so close that all the lethal noise of that day was gathered and concentrated into its one split second, and Ljubica changed her mind and began to cry, disengaging from her mother’s shelter and facing out into whatever it was, screaming, not in fear but in anger. In numb fascination her parents gazed at her. It was a minute before they understood that the machine-gun fire had stopped. There was some more ordnance, but much farther away now.

  “Full of surprises ain’t you,” Reef taking Ljubica and with calibrated softness kissing her streaming eyes. “No more bumblebees, kid.” When it was quiet again, he thought of something. “Be back in a minute.” He went off in the direction the machine-gun fire had been coming from. Ljubica wrinkled her forehead and waved an arm and made an inquisitive sort of “Ah?”

  “Your father’s needs are simple,” Yashmeen explained, “and so it wouldn’t surprise me if—why yes, look, just what I thought. See what Papa has brought home.”

  “A miracle,” Reef said. “It’s all in one piece.” He held up a peculiar-looking rifle whose barrel seemed much wider than usual, though this turned out to be a perforated casing for air-cooling the weapon. “Folks, meet the Madsen machine rifle. Been hearing about these for a while now. Every Russian cavalry division used to carry some, but they decided to get rid of ’em awhile back and a lot came on the market out here, especially up in Montenegro, where they’re known as Rexers. Lookit this. Five hundred rounds a minute on auto, and when the barrel gets too hot—” He produced a duplicate barrel, twisted off the first, and replaced it. He had also managed to scavenge a number of quarter-circular magazines holding forty rounds each.

  “I’m happy for you, of course,” said Yashmeen.

  “Oh and here.” Somewhere in this ashen field among the corpses and blood and the seep of cordite smoke and fragments of steel he had found a patch of wildflowers, and now he handed them each a small bouquet. Ljubica immediately began to eat hers, and Yash just gazed at Reef until her eyes were too wet, and then she wiped them with her sleeve.

  “Thanks. We should be moving.”

  Now and then in the weeks that followed they would find themselves wondering—though they could never find the time to just sit and talk it through—if the permission they had felt when Cyprian was with them, the freedom to act extraordinarily, had come from residence in a world about to embrace its end—closer to the freedom of the suicide than that of the ungoverned spirit.

  THE WINTER COMING DOWN. The war unpredictably everywhere. They sheltered often in the temporary thatch huts of Sarakatsàni, for it was these people of no country, no native town, no fixed abode, the nomads of the Peninsula, who would see them to safety, who shared their own food, tobacco, and sleeping space. Yashmeen gave them jars of rose preserve that Zhivka had put up for them, brought this far miraculously unbroken, and they gave her a wooden baby-carrying rig to strap to her back, which she and Reef, who had started calling Ljubica “the papoose,” took turns with. Ljubica rode along perched up like a lookout, inviting her parents’ attention to horsemen, sheepdogs and sheep, drops of rain . . . the obstinate accompaniment of horse and field artillery, flanking, pursuing. At last they came over the Bukovo Pass and down into Ohrid, beside its pale wind-rippled lake, in among red roofs, acacias and alleyways, its town clamor, which did not include guns, welcome as silence. Turkish deserters slept on the beach, haunted the mosques, traded weapons for cigarettes.

  There had been forty thousand Turks at Monastir, German-trained under the legendary Liman von Sanders, whose plans included sending his murderous creatures into the Ukraine when the time arrived for war with Russia. An intimidating claim, to’ve been schooled in the arts of mass death by Germans. But now the Serbs knew they could beat them.

  THEY LOOKED ACROSS THE LAKE, up at the black peaks, already with some snow on them. A chasm had opened in the clouds, which light poured down through, a vertical torrent of light, cleaving through all the imaginable shades of gray which inhabited the sky, as if presenting the day with choices it seldom if ever saw.

  “It’s Albania,” she said. Cyprian had told them to stay out of Albania. Everybody had. Not that the folks there weren’t warm and hospitable as ever, but there was some kind of revolution going on up north, against the Turks, the Greeks had invaded and occupied the south, and much of the fighting was informal, by way of long-range rifles. “There may be one paved road somewhere, but it
’s bound to take us right into the worst of the fighting.”

  “Let’s see. Winter in the mountains, no map, everybody shootin at everybody else.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Hell, let’s do it.”

  BEFORE SETTING OFF down the shore of the lake, as if they were only out here on holiday, they bought postal cards illustrated with scenes of the War, and stamps each printed in two or three languages, not to mention Turkish and Cyrillic alphabets, with provisional overprints in these as well as Roman face. Some of the photographs showed terrible scenes of slaughter and mutilation, reproduced not in simple black and white but varying shades of green, a quite fluorescent green as a matter of fact—shell craters, limbless men at field hospitals, gigantic cannons, aeroplanes flying in formation. . . . They posted them, in the sure and certain hope of none arriving, to Yz-les-Bains, Chunxton Crescent, Gabrovo Slim and Zhivka, Frank and Mayva in the U.S.A., Kit Traverse and Auberon Halfcourt, Hotel Tarim, Kashgar, Chinese Turkestan.

  At the south end of the lake, they went down the footpath to Sveti Naum and crossed into Albania. Traffic was unremitting both ways, Mahommedan refugees driven from their homes in Albania by the Greek invaders, and Turkish remnants from the defeat at Monastir fleeing south trying to find their way to the fortress at Yanina, the last residue of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and the only safety left to them here in Epirus. The guards at the gate, when they paid attention at all, shrugged everybody through. They were no longer sure, for one thing, whom they were reporting to.

  Reef, Yash, and Ljubica had entered a theatre of war where everybody shot at everybody, not always for reasons the targets could appreciate in detail, though pissed off enough seemed to provide all the motive folks needed.

  They were ambushed outside Pogradeci, on the road to Korça, by a band of irregulars, not more than half a dozen, Reef estimated, though the distinction between guerrillas and road agents had become for the moment meaningless.