Against the Day (187 page)

“I think I see a way,” said Cyprian.
He led them up into a skein of goat paths. Here and there steps had been cut
into the rock. Soon, audible above the boiling uproar below them, came choral
voices, and they had reached a path, kept clear of brush and fallen rock
debris, ascending in the long departure of light to a dark mossed arch above
them, underneath which stood a figure in a monk’s robe, with its hands held
out, palms upward, as if presenting an invisible offering.

Reef had pulled out a pack of Byal
Sredets and offered them to the monk, who held up a finger and then, inquiring
with his eyebrows, another, and took two cigarettes, beaming.

   
“
Zdrave,
“Cyprian greeted
him,
“
kakvo ima?
”

He
got a long stare of appraisal. At length the man spoke, in Universityaccented
English. “Welcome home.”

The convent belonged
to a sect descended from ancient
Bogomils who did not embrace the Roman Church in 1650 with most of the other
Pavlikeni
but
chose instead to go underground.
To their particular faith, over the centuries, had become attached older, more
nocturnal elements, going back, it was claimed, to the Thracian demigod
Orpheus, and his dismemberment not far from here, on the banks of the Hebrus
River, nowadays known

as the Maritza. The Manichæan aspect had grown ever
stronger—the obligation of those who took refuge here to be haunted by
the unyielding doubleness of everything. Part of the discipline for a postulant
was to remain acutely conscious, at every moment of the day, of the nearly
unbearable conditions of cosmic struggle between darkness and light proceeding,
inescapably, behind the presented world.

Yashmeen at dinner that evening, with
a discreet scream of recognition, took note of the convent’s prohibition
against beans, a Pythagorean dietary rule she remembered being also observed by
the T.W.I.T. Before long she was able to discover more of the Pythagorean
akousmata
—arguing
strongly, she felt, for a common origin. She could also not help noticing that
the hegumen, Father Ponko, had the Tetractys tattooed on his head.

He was more than willing to talk about
the Order. “At some point Orpheus, never comfortable in any kind of history
that could not be sung, changed identities, or slowly blended with another
demigod, Zalmoxis, who some in Thrace believed was the only true God. According
to Herodotus, who heard it from Greeks living around the Black Sea, Zalmoxis
had once been a slave of Pythagoras himself, who upon receiving his freedom
went on to pile up a goodsize fortune, returned here to Thrace, and became a
great teacher of Pythagorean doctrine.”

There was an icon of Zalmoxis in the
church, where Yashmeen and Reef found Cyprian after the evening service
kneeling on the stone floor, before the carved iconostasis, gazing into it as
if into a cinema screen where pictures moved and stories unfolded which he must
attend to. Shadowless faces of Zalmoxis and the saints. And depending on a kind
of second sight, a knowledge beyond light of what lay within the wood itself,
of what it was one’s duty to set free
. . . .

Yashmeen knelt beside him. Reef stood
close by, holding and slowly rocking Ljubica. After a bit Cyprian seemed to
return to ordinary candlelight.

   
“How
devoted you look,” he smiled.

   
“Oh,
you are ragging me.”

   
He
shrugged. “Only surprised.”

“To find me in a sacred place.
Trivial, housewifely me. Have you forgotten the church up on Krâstova Gora,
where I first learned not only that my baby would be a girl but exactly what
her face would look like? I knelt and received that, Cyprian, and I pray you
may arrive at a moment of knowledge remotely like it.”

   
They
rose, and walked out of the narthex, the three of them and Ljubica,

out into the scent of myrtle in the deepening dusk. “When you
leave here,”

Cyprian said quietly, “I shan’t be coming with you.”

At first she didn’t hear the
quietness of it, and thought he was angry, and was about to ask what she’d
done, when he added, “I must stay here, you see.”

Though she could not trust herself
then to speak, Yashmeen already knew. She had begun to feel him leaving as long
ago as their tour of the French casinos, as if he had discovered a way back,
not a reversion to any known type, more a reoccupying of a life he might have
forgotten or never noticed there all the time waiting, and she had come slowly
to understand she could not go with him wherever he was bound, watching
helplessly as each day the distance opened a bit more. Despite their bravest
hopes. If he had been desperately ill, she would at least have recognized and
carried out her duty to him, but that slow departure, as if into the marshes of
Time, miasmata rising, reeking, odors that went directly to the most ancient
part of the brain, summoning memories older than her present incarnation, had
begun, even long before Ljubica, to overwhelm her.

“It may be,” Cyprian said as gently
as he thought he had to, “that God doesn’t always require us to wander about.
It may be that sometimes there is a— would you say a ‘convergence’ to a
kind of stillness, not merely in space but in Time as well?”

Gentle or not, Yashmeen took it
personally anyway. The extent of her statelessness had unfolded for her like
the progress of a sky from dawn into its shadowless day, a wandering in which
she would count as home only the web of sympathetic spirits who had dug spaces
beneath their own precarious dwellings to harbor her for a night or two at a
time. Who might not always be there when she needed them to be.

Reef on the other hand thought
Cyprian had only come up with some new way to be difficult, and would soon be
on to something else. “So you’re fixin to be a nun. Аnd
. . .
they ain’t supposed to chop nothin
off, nothin like ’at
. . . .
”

“They are taking me in as exactly the
person I am,” Cyprian said. “No more of these tiresome gender questions.”

   
“You’re
free,” Yashmeen speculated.

Cyprian was apologetic. “I know you
were counting on me. Even if it was only for body mass, another tree in the
windbreak. I feel that I just fell over and left you all exposed
. . . .
”

“You know, you’re so damn clever all
the time,” Reef said, “it’s hard to trust anything you say.”

   
“Another
British vice. I’m sorry for that, too.”

“Well, you can’t stay here. Hell, be
Bernadette o’ Lourdes if you want, just not out here. I know it’s your particular
patch and all, but Pete’s sake, take a look around. One thing I’m never wrong
about is knowin when there’s a

fight on the way. Nothin telepathic,
just professional. Too damn many Mannlichers all over the place.”

   
“Oh,
there won’t be any war.”

How could either of them say, “But
you see how impossible it would be to defend this place, no clear lines of
retreat, no escape.” Cyprian must have known by now what happened to convents
in wartime. Especially out here, where it’d been nothing but massacre and
reprisal for centuries. But that was Balkan politics. In here other matters
were more important.

“They have adapted the
σχημα
,”
Cyprian
explained, “the Orthodox initiation rite, to their own much older beliefs. In
the Orphic story of the world’s beginning, Night preceded the creation of the
Universe, she was the daughter of Chaos, the Greeks called her
Νυξ
,
and the old Thracians worshipped her as a deity. For
a postulant in this order, Night is one’s betrothed, one’s beloved, one seeks
to become not a bride at all really, but a kind of sacrifice, an offering, to
Night.”

“And shall we”—Yashmeen pausing
as if to allow the term “exbeloved” to occur in silence—“be allowed
there? At your ceremony?”

“It could be months, even years away.
In the Eastern rite, they cut off the novice’s hair, which she must then weave
into a kind of girdle, and wear it under her habit, round her waist, forever.
Which means that before they’ll even consider me as a candidate, I must first
grow my hair long enough—and given my current waist measurement, that
could be quite some time.”

   
“Listen
to yourself,” said Reef.

   
“Yes
Cyprian, how vain, really, you’re supposed to be renouncing all that.”

He grabbed two handfuls of the roll
of fat in question and regarded them doubtfully. “Father Ponko admits that the
hairlength rule is nothing to do with consecration, really—it’s to give
us time to think about the step we plan to take, as it’s not for everyone.”

“Having
your hair cut off is nothing,” the hegumen announced one day to the assembled postulants,
“compared to the Vow of Silence. Talking, for women, is a form of breathing. To
renounce it is the greatest sacrifice a woman can make. Soon you will enter a
country none of you have known and few can imagine—the realm of silence.
Before crossing that fateful frontier, each of you is to be allowed one
question, one only. Think closely, my children, and do not waste this
opportunity.”

When
it was Cyprian’s turn, he knelt and whispered, “What is it that is born of
light?”

   
Father
Ponko was watching him with a look of unaccustomed sorrow, as if

there were an answer he must on no account give, lest it call
down the fulfillment of some awful prophecy. “In the fourteenth century,” he
said carefully, “our great enemies were the Hesychasts, contemplatives who
might as well have been Japanese Buddhists—they sat in their cells
literally gazing at their navels, waiting to be enfolded in a glorious light
they believed was the same light Peter, James, and John had witnessed at the
Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor. Perhaps they asked themselves forms
of your question as well, as a sort of koan. What is it that was born of
that
light? Oddly, if one reads the Gospel accounts, the emphasis in all three
is not on an excess of light but a deficiency—the Transfiguration
occurred at best under a peculiar sort of halflight. ‘There came a cloud and
overshadowed them,’ as Luke puts it. Those
omphalopsychoi
may have seen
a holy light, but its link with the Transfiguration is doubtful.

“Now
I must ask you in turn—when something is born of light, what does that
light enable us to see?”

It
turned out, as Yashmeen was quick to grasp, that Father Ponko was approaching
the Transfiguration story from the direction of the Old Testament. He seemed
under no illusions about her religiosity but was always willing to chat with
the unbelieving. “You are familiar with the idea of the Shekhinah—That
which dwells?”

Yashmeen
nodded, her years with the T.W.I.T. having provided her a broad though shallow
footing in British Kabbalism. “It is the feminine aspect of God.” Eyes
brightening, she told him of the transcendent status enjoyed at Chunxton
Crescent by card number II in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, known as The High
Priestess, and of the Mayfair debutantes who showed up there on Saturday nights
in veils and peculiar headgear and with very little idea of what any of it
might mean—“Some thought it had to do with the Suffragette movement, and
they spoke vaguely of ‘empowerment’
. . .
some,
men chiefly, were in it for the erotic implications of a JudaeoChristian
goddess, and expected orgies, flogging, shiny black accoutrements and so forth,
so naturally for them the whole point got lost in a masturbational sort of
haze.”

“Always
that risk,” agreed Father Ponko. “When God hides his face, it is paraphrased as
‘taking away’ his Shekhinah. Because it is she who reflects his light, Moon to
his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her to
reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the essence if he is to be at
all operative in the world.”

From
the chapel came voices singing what the hegumen had identified as a
canone
of
Cosmas of Jerusalem, dating from the eighth century. Yashmeen stood very still
in the courtyard, as if waiting for some vertigo to pass, despite having
already understood that vertigo was somehow designed into the

place, a condition of residence. She recognized here what the
T.W.I.T. had always pretended to be but was never more than a frail theatrical
sketch of. “Talk about reflection,” she found herself muttering.

The present tense seemed less
accessible to her each day, as postulants circled Cyprian, and he was carried
farther from her, as by a wave passing through some invisible, imponderable
medium
. . . .
And Ljubica, who gazed
at the daily life of the convent as if she knew exactly what was going on, who
uncounted times had fallen asleep with her small fist around one of Cyprian’s
fingers, now must seek other ways to return accurately to what she remembered
of the realms of the notyetcreated.