Against the Day, Chapter Thirteen: Dally and Kit: A Hungarian Romance!

So this continues from the last chapter. Ol' Clive has the idea that, as appealing as selling her to a harem might be, Dally "might more constructively serve as a bribe to somebody useful" (909). He sends some goons to kidnap her, but who should appear but ol' Kit, who was on a train going in the other direction, to Budapest (styled, probably more accurately, Buda-Pesth here). He gets rid of them by telling them that this is in fact "my wife Euphorbia, yes and we are planning to spend our honeymoon in Constantinople." So they escape, and we get this kind of neat bit:

Years later, they would be unable to agree on how they found themselves on the Szécheny-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. (910)

Obviously, it's the case that people remember things differently, sometimes radically so. But! Let's not forget that Kit and Dally's initial meeting was on a passenger ship that turned out to simultaneously be a battleship from the future. That is, we are clearly invited to see their conflicting memories as being ambiguously another example of doubling. Very well-played, I thought.

We get a brief flashback to Kit's time in the border town of Pera, where he was working as a bartender whilst all manner of international intrigue when on around him. He meets Viktor Mulciber, the arms merchant from way back when who was looking for the Q-weapon. He doesn't really do much, but he does give Kit a business card with the address of an aircraft manufacturer in Turin. I'm not sure if this will come up again. At any rate, he gets in the middle of a squabble and it's not safe in town anymore, so that's when he took a train out and then met Dally.

Lotta fuckin'. Not much to say about it except that it's actually quite refreshing to see a relationship like this that doesn't appear to rely on the sorts of oft-dubious power dynamics that Pynchon habitually goes to. In Szeged, they see an operetta called The Burgher King, which seems basically just to be there for the, let's face it, not-hyper-impressive pun. It stars Béla Blaskó, which, yes, is Bela Lugosi's original name. There's a surprising amount of detail about the plot, which is a pretty standard sort of thing where the king goes out in disguise to see his people and falls in love with a commoner while there and he also has an advisor who goes after him and likewise falls in love and...you know.

Dally is taken with Blaskó's performance, but Kit wonders: "what's with that piece of business where he bites old Heidi's neck, what was that all about?" Yes, okay, I think we get it! But seriously, ANOTHER vampire! Along with Zoltan and Pugnax! What is going ON here?!?

What are they going to do? Hard to say; Dally does in theory have acting commitments back in London, but it seems like it might not be wise to return. Well, they'll figure something out. And the chapter ends with cunnilingus, as perhaps all chapters should.