Against the Day (145 page)

“You don’t have to come wave goodbye
at the depot, fact it’s better you don’t, ’cause I won’t be wavin back anyway.”

   
“Something
on your mind Reef?”

Reef shrugged. “You never wanted in
on that deal. You dragged your feet all the way. Well it’s over now and so
long, kid.”

   
“You’re
blaming me for what happened?”

   
“You
sure wa’n’ no help.”

Kit’s fingers began to ache, and he
peered back at his brother, hoping he’d heard wrong.

“Your fairy godfather’s still out
there drinkin Champagne and pissin on Pa’s memory. And there’s nothin you can
say anymore, ’cause you don’t know nothin.” Reef turned and went glaring away,
shoulders hunched, up onto the Ponte degli Scalzi, soon absorbed into a
mobility of hundreds of separate futures, whose destiny could not be told in
any but a statistical way. And that was that.

Off on the night steamer
for Trieste, the lights through the fog apt to slide off into spectral
effects, billowing like cloaks flourished by sleepless masqueraders, Giudecca
invisible
. . .
likewise the shrouded
Stromboli
and the other Italian warships at anchor
. . .
the calls of the gondolieri taking
on in the
foschia
a queer anxiety, the leather sides of trunks and
valises wet and shining in the electric glare
. . .
Dally kept disappearing, with Kit each time expecting her not to
be there when the view cleared again. Lighters and
traghetti,
carrying
travelers, baggage, and cargo, crowded the little fetch, each vessel a
waterborne stage for highintensity theatricals, passionate practical advice
from all directions, trunks handed up in the vaporous scurry, always just about
to topple comically, with their owners, into the canal. Musicians in twos and
threes were playing all along the Zattere, some from the King’s Band, picking
up a few extra soldi. Everything in minor modality.

Nobody
would have come to see Kit off, his brother was on the rails again, already
miles out of town, and now Dally thought of it, what in blazes was she

doing here saying
goodbye—nothing better to do? What could sentimental embraces at the
water’s edge mean to this jasper anyway?

Around
them travelers drank wine out of cheap Murano souvenirs, clapped shoulders,
brushed away leaf and petal debris from lastminute bouquets, argued over who
had failed to pack what
. . . .
Dally
was supposed to be past the melancholy of departure, no longer held by its
gravity, yet, as if she could see the entire darkened reach of what lay ahead,
she wanted now to step close, embrace him, this boy, for as long as it took to
establish some twofold self, renounce the somber fate he seemed so sure of. He
was gazing at her as if having just glimpsed the simple longitude of what he
was about to do, as if desiring to come into some shelter, though maybe not her
idea of it. . . so, like terms on each side canceling, they only stood there,
curtains of Venetian mist between them, among the steamsirens and clamoring
boatmen, and both young people understood a profound opening of distinction
between those who would be here, exactly here day after tomorrow to witness the
next gathering before passage, and those stepping off the night precipice of
this journey, who would never be here, never exactly here, again.

earest Father,

I write in uncertainty as to whether
you shall ever read this—so, paradoxically, in a kind of faith, now made
perhaps more urgent by doubts which have arisen concerning those to whose care
you entrusted me, so long ago.

I believe that the T.W.I.T. no longer
act in my interest—that my continued safety is now of little consequence
to them, if not indeed a positive obstacle to plans of their own kept entirely
hidden from me. We are at present in Switzerland, and due to entrain in a day
or two for BudaPesth, where, unless my “gifts of prophecy” have deserted me,
danger and perhaps sorrow await.

The unexpressed term, as ever,
remains Shambhala—though you, who have long and honourably served within
its sphere of influence, may find it easy to dismiss the anxieties of one who
knows it only at second (let us say, third) hand. Yet, like those religious charlatans
who claim direct intercourse with God, there are an increasing number at the
T.W.I.T. who presume a similar intimacy with the Hidden City, and who, more
disturbingly, cannot separate it from the secular politics of presentday
Europe.

History has flowed in to surround us
all, and I am left adrift without certainty, only conjectures. At Göttingen,
for a while, after the revolution in Russia, I was perceived as useful by at
least one group of heretical Bolshevist refugees. The recent understanding between
England and Russia has seemingly enhanced my value to the British War and
Foreign Offices. As for what use I still may be to the T.W.I.T., only they can
say— but will not. It is as if I possessed, without my knowledge, some
key to an

encrypted message of great moment,
which others are locked in struggle to come into control of.

Those in whose company I travel but
among whom, I fear, I am no longer counted, once presented themselves as
seekers after a kind of transcendence
. . . .
I believed, for many years—too many—that I might someday
learn the way. Now that they have forfeited my trust, I must look elsewhere
. . . .
For what mission have I here, in
this perilous segment of spacetime, if not somehow to transcend it, and the
tragic hour into which it is passing?

Mathematics once seemed the
way—the internal life of numbers came as a revelation to me, perhaps as
it might have to a Pythagorean apprentice long ago in Crotona—a
reflection of some lessaccessible reality, through close study of which one might
perhaps learn to pass beyond the difficult given world.

Professor McTaggart, at Cambridge,
took what one must call the cheerful view, and I confess that for a while I
shared his vision of a community of spirits in perfect concord, the old
histories of blood and destruction evolved at last into an era of enlightenment
and peace, which he compared to a senior combinationroom without a master. I am
today perhaps more of a Nietzschean, returned to thoughts of the dark future of
slavery and danger from which you sought to rescue me. But one’s rescue is
surely, at the end of the day, one’s own responsibility.

I had the obvious thought once that
all this wandering about must have an object—a natural convergence to
you, and that you and I need only be reunited for all to come clear at last.
But more and more lately, I find I cannot set aside your profession, the
masters you serve, the interests which all this time out there in Inner Asia,
however unconsciously, you have been furthering. These are matters upon which you
always observed the strictest vow of Silence, and I expect no argument I
advance, even now as a competent adult, could induce you to break it. Though I
cannot with certainty say when or even if I may see you again, I was haunted by
the possibility that, if we ever did meet at last, we might both, against our
wills, stumble into a serious, perhaps a fatal, row.

But you came to me last night in a
dream. You said, “I am not at all as you have imagined me.” You took my hand.
We ascended, or rather, we were taken aloft, as if in mechanical rapture, to a
great skyborne town and a small band of serious young people, dedicated to
resisting death and tyranny, whom I understood at once to be the Compassionate.
Their faces were strangely
specific,
faces which could easily appear in
the

waking day here below, men and women
I should recognize in the moment for who they were
. . . .

They used to visit all the time,
coming in swiftly out of the empty desert, lighted from within. I did not dream
this, Father. Each time when they went away again, it was to return to “The
Work of the World”—always that same phrase—a formula, a prayer.
Theirs was the highest of callings. If there was any point to our living in
that terrible wilderness, it was to persist in the hope of being brought in
among them someday, to learn the Work, to transcend the World.

Why have they remained silent, for so
long? Silent and invisible. Have I lost the ability to recognize them? the
privilege? I must find them again. It must not be too late for me. I imagine
sometimes that you have led an expedition to Shambhala, troops of horsemen in
red jackets, and are there now, safe, among the Compassionate. Please. If you
know anything, please. I can go on wandering, but I cannot remain at this stage
of things—I must ascend, for down here I am so blind and vulnerable, and
it torments my heart—

Do you know of the sixteenthcentury
Tibetan scholarprince Rinpungpa? Mourning the recent passing of his father,
which has made him the last of his dynasty, his new reign beset with enemies,
Rinpungpa believes he can look for advice only toward Shambhala, where his
father has been reborn and now dwells. So the prince writes him a letter,
though he knows of no way to deliver it. But then, in a vision, a Yogi appears
to him, who is also himself, the man of clarity and strength he knows he must
become, now that his father has gone to Shambhala—and Rinpungpa also
understands that it is this Yogi who will be his messenger.

Mr. Kit Traverse, who brings you this
letter, like myself, journeys at the mercy of Forces whose deployment and
strength he has but an imperfect grasp of, which may well cause him damage. He
must continue, as must I, an intensive schooling in modes of evasion and
escape, even, with luck, now and then, counterattack. He is not my “other
self,” yet in some way I feel that he is my brother.

Father, I have long known of a
strange doubleness to my life—a child rescued from slavery yet continuing
her journey along the same ancient road of abasement. Somewhere another version
of me is at Shambhala with you. This version of me which has stayed behind,
like Prince Rinpungpa, must be content with writing a letter. If you receive
it, please find a way to answer.

   
My
love.

   
Insh’allah.

·
    
·
    
·

Afterward people would ask
Kit why he hadn’t brought along a hand camera. By then he
was noticing how many Europeans had begun to define themselves by where they’d
been able to afford to travel, part of the process being to bore interminably
anybody who’d sit still for it with these illframed, outoffocus snaps.

He kept some
of the ticket stubs, so he knew in a general way that his route had taken him
via Bucharest, to Constantza, where he boarded a small, bedraggled steamer,
sailed along the Black Sea coast to Batumi, where you could smell the lemon
groves before you saw them, got on a train there and crossed the Caucasus where
Russians stood out in front of dukhans to watch them go by, raising their vodka
glasses amiably. Fields of rhododendrons spilled down the mountainsides, and giant
walnut logs came floating steeply downstream, destined for saloon bars like
those in Colorado that Kit had once lounged against as a boy. Last stop on the
line was Baku on the Caspian Sea, where he had the impression, though not the
photographic evidence, of a very remote sandswept oil port, night in the
daytime, skies of hell, boiling red and black,
shades of black,
no
escape from the smell, streets that led nowhere, never more than a step from
some drugged stupor or rugrider’s blade, with life not only cheap but sometimes
of negative value—according to Western field reps more than happy to bend
his ear on the topic, nobody to depend on, too much money to be made, too easy
to lose it. . . the only relief from it being the parties held aboard corporate
yachts moored among oil tankers down at the quays, portholes sealed against the
sand and the smell of oil. The futures of these visitors, actuarially speaking,
did not to Kit seem bright, and he left Baku regarding in some horror from the
weather decks the port receding under black skies, among pillars of fire,
wellsprings of natural gas burning since the days of the ancient
fireworshippers, scrawls of oil towers and loading piers against the blurred
light off the water.