Against the Day, Chapter Nine: The Expedition of Cyprian Latewood!

...and suddenly, bam, I'm in love again. Seriously, after a few that I sort of slogged through, I thought this chapter was just durned great. Picaresque, atmospheric, good character development--yeah!

As you remember, Cyprian and Bevis are heading into the Balkans. They're traveling along the Croatian coastline by ship, where they meet a...girl? woman? named Jacintha Drulov. It's not clear to me quite how old she's supposed to be, but I'm going older because Bevis is putting the moves on her and I don't want it to be creepy. He explains--this is a fairly amusing riff--how he has a lot of experience in the field of "Advanced Idiotics," a field that exists because "one cannot overestimate the value of appearing to dwell in a state of idiocy." It was crazy. "Even the food was idiotic" (823). He gets the ship's band to play a jaunty little number called "The Idiotic." Good times.

They reach the town of Kotor in Montenegro, and from there to Sarajevo in Bosnia, where they're to meet a fellow named Danilo Ashkil, a polyglot:

Well before the Austrian annexation, his skill with languages and gifts of permeability among all elements of the population had brought him to the attention of the Evidenzbüro. For traveling operatives of all the Powers, he had become the one indispensable man in the Balkans to drop by and visit. But now he was in danger, and it had fallen to Cyprian and Bevis to see him to safety. (827)

Danilo explains how, in his opinion, "except in the most limited and trivial ways, history does not take place north of the forty-fifth parallel...Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it....Now, imagine a history referred not to London, Paris, Berlin, or St. Petersburg but to Constantinople" (828). It's an interesting idea, though I have to note that "different sorts of Christian killing each other" elides a whole lot.

At a bar, Cyprian runs into his old friends Misha and Grisha--they were the procurers who connected him with Khäutsch. They're not working for him anymore, and much chiller now. They tell the story: it seems his superiors did the thing where you leave the disgraced officer alone in a room with a loaded gun, but instead of killing himself he shot his way out and escaped. And, whaddaya know, there he is, although Cyrpian is somewhat disillusioned: "The eyes remained purposeful as a serpent's, recalling unavoidable chastisements Cyprian had undergone at the hands of this droning, seedy pub bore, some of which he had actually found, at the time, erotic" (831). But Khäutsch doesn't even seem to remember him.

Danilo reveals that--apparently--the truth is not what Cyprian had thought it was:

You have come to Sarajevo on a dummy assignment. All to lure you out here to Bosnia, where it is easier for the Austrians to take you. Your English employers have shopped you to them as a 'Serbian agent,' so that neither they nor, in the current climate, even the Russians will feel especially inclined to save you. It seems you owe England nothing anymore. I advise you to go. Save your life. (832)

So they're going, and Danilo's going with them. But somehow, they lose Bevis somewhere, and "Cyprian and Danilo were adrift and mapless in a region of mountains and forest and unexpected deep wooded ravines" (833). Things are not going so great, what with being attacked by unseen Austrian agents and things and having to book it. It's winter, storming, and things are getting cold and desperate. Danilo breaks his leg, and it seems like it might be the end of him. Fortunately, they find a small village at which to sit out the winter and recover.

Ultimately, they reach Danilo's hometown of Salonica. One thing there's a lot of in this chapter is Cyprian and his release from desire: "Where was desire, and where was he, who had been almost entirely fashioned of nothing but desire?" (844). We've seen this before and will again, but it's really front and center here, and I'm not sure how to situate it in terms of the book as a whole, or Cyprian's character specifically, really. Is it connected to Buddhism's Four Noble Truths: that attachment or desire is the source of suffering, and by renouncing it you can--in theory!--attain nirvana? Maybe. Do you think that ALL this geopolitical suffering the book treats of can be traced to desire? I don't know. Probably no use hitting this too hard. But there we have it.

Speaking of geopolitics: more of them, specifically Germany and Russia bickering over whether it's okay to annex Bosnia. What does Bosnia think? Whatevz. Cyprian meets a Bulgarian known as Gabrovo Slim. Apparently this place is not so good for Bulgarians to be at this time, with all kinds of groups trying to murder them, so he wants to get out. Cyprian agrees to trade clothing with him for that purpose. I'm not sure if we'll see him again. It seems like we ought to.

Anyway! Cyprian is heading back to Trieste, when he finds Bevis, who was wintering in the Montenegrin city of Cetinje with that Jacintha woman. So that's okay. This passage is just beautiful:

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 swallows were assaulting humans they considered intrusive. (847)

I mean okay maybe it's not that amazing it itself, but the fact that Pynchon can just keep writing things like that--goodness!