Page 50 of Shadow Ticket

Not that Daphne would admit to being lost, although it hasn’t taken her long to regret this impulsive attempt to find Hop.

She has blundered out into a territory she thought she knew, which in fact the political situation has changed to something unrecognizable and poisonous.

The best plan she can come up with is to retrace the old Klezmopolitan routes she remembers.

Wear solid hiking shoes and watch her step.

Hamburg, once the Swing Kid metropolis, is especially depressing for Daphne to visit.

Dockyard neighborhoods solidly Social Democratic and Communist are suddenly all infested with brownshirts, singing Nazi lyrics to the tune of “The Internationale,” “Auf Hit…lerleute, schlie?t, die Reih-en” and so forth, known as the “Hitlernazionale.” Local citizens try to drown this out by singing the original anthem, which might be charming enough for a travelogue, amusing even, except for the physical violence it always degenerates into.

Negroes have vanished from the Reeperbahn jazz bars, leaving unlighted windows and Rooms to Let signs all through St. Pauli.

Blues licks have largely given way to major triads.

Now and then she thinks she sees familiar faces, Swing Kids aged into the hopeless awareness that what may have been possible for them once is no longer so.

Girls who used to dance their braids all loose before the end of the first set are now en route to children, church, and kitchen.

No greetings of “Swing Heil!” anymore, not even in a whisper.

No more gathering up closer to the bandstand to listen, humming harmony, sometimes to just hold each other and what they called “sway” in time to the music.

Daphne understands that she has already seen the last days of Klezmania, traveling parties of Swing Kids and Red Front fans, Jewish and otherwise, fraternizing shamelessly, who knows what expectations tumbling through their minds.

The sort of thing Jew-haters don’t like to see but cops do, because it means overtime.

To call yourself a Swing Kid was to count on a fight every time you went out to hear music, or dance, or even just hang around, running on little more than beer and their own adrenaline, while the Hitlerboys would be cranked up to unnatural levels of speed and force by the latest pills intended for Army use, some still under research at IG Farben.

Creeping their way after the last set, dazed and apprehensive, back out into the deep hours of a future where not even furtive reprises can any longer be counted on and the streetcars home are few if running at all anymore…

One evening just past sundown Daphne wanders into a beer garden the Klezmopolitans once played at, formerly named the Midnight Mouse after a poem by Christian Morgenstern, now converted to a Sturmlokal, Der Schlagstock, with SA, since it’s legal to wear the uniform again, all over the place, amateur Nazi choir music, not so much sung as shouted in unison, tables crowded with boys in identical shirts and haircuts…

About the time her foot touches the doorsill, Daphne, who must have slid somehow into a nostalgic daze, is reminded it’s back to the present tense.

“Looking for me, Sch?tzchen?”

“Long way from Friedrichstra?e tonight.”

She tries to turn and step back out but her way is blocked by Hitler-happy adolescents, faces already familiar by way of the newsreels, imagining themselves predators but when observed more closely, fated after all to suffer, to be brought down as prey, even at the hands of those they thought were brothers in a struggle for which they themselves were always too fragile.

Congratulations, Cheez Princess, she snarls to herself, you’re about to become fondue.

Providentially, overhead, approaching out of the dusk, comes a godawful racket.

“Ach nein!”

Alarmed gazes skyward. “This one again!”

“Take cover!”

Catching the last of the departing sunlight, a white apparition comes sailing ominously in.

Shouting down through a megaphone, “Need a ride, sister, I’ll be right with you.

” Since she began flying the autogyro, something in Glow Tripforth del Vasto has begun to stir, something deep and each time less disposed to forgive.

Across her face now and then there will drift, only for a second but ominous while it lasts, some sign of a counter-angelic presence that lives to do harm, till all goes flickering back to normal, likely nothing more than one of those twitches in the everyday weave and reweave, you’d like to think, and yet…

There are times when enough, frankly, is enough.

Some annoyances do really have to be seen to.

In the interlude of waiting for the rotor to get back up to speed in a loud rising scream, as Sturm kiddies mill about, cringing, taking snapshots, raising steins in salute, Daphne runs and climbs into the mother-in-law seat in front of Glow, hollering, “Noisy rig, ain’t it?

” except nobody hears her over the racket, bedazzled by the twilight flickering between the vanes as they slowly begin to roll, to pick up speed.

She falls into a light trance, next thing they’re headed down the road at about the local speed limit for farm wagons, and up into the sky they’re taken.

Or what, with a gyro, passes for sky. Because down this low, as Daphne is soon to learn, the ground also figures as part of the flight…

not really transcending the earth, not soaring into some higher element, but following perfectly the nap of the terrain, every hollow and haystack, every turn of creek, tobogganing hill, and lover’s leap…

“Thanks for the lift.”

“Halo’s in the shop or I’d blink it at you.”

“I want to believe they’re only being obnoxious but I think it’s worse than that.”

“It’s worse.” Glow and her skycraft have tangled more than once with Hitlerist gunboys in biplanes and sport zeps, and it hasn’t ended well for any of the lads.

“Flight these days isn’t as much fun as it was once upon a time.

Borders less easy to cross, sharpshooters, ack-ack fire, airborne pursuit and interception. ”

At first, too busy to feel anxiety, each time she stalled or lost the engine Glow undramatically settled in a long and serene lapse to earth as the rotor vanes slowly, deeply folded her to a safe landing, till one morning, as she flew along a ridgeline in the Pyrenees, there came to her unbidden the certainty that she would never crash in this thing, along with its corollary vision of the future of autogyroing—a flood of no-talent stumblebums barging into skies already crowded enough, fools smiled on by the gods of flight, guaranteed happy landings every time, parachuting down on those pale vanes graceful as wings…

“Gyros are forgiving ships, 90 percent foolproof—and there’s the danger.

The idiot appeal. Man in Indiana taught his dog how to fly one, now the dog flies him everywhere, a sky chauffeur, wears this li’l sort of outfit, hat, goggles, and so forth…

Fools will flock to this machine, attracted by the simplicity of operation.

Romance on the cheap. Too many will do things wrong and have accidents far enough short of tragic to give the rest of us a bad name, with insurance companies and loan officers suddenly all over the place.

“But look, right down there’s a tavern, it’s cocktail hour, and the least you can do is buy me a drink.” Gliding to earth with the accustomed racket which brings half the customers outside to have a look.

Glow’s been a longtime regular here. “Place back then was no bigger’n a hiker’s hut, and Miklos here was running his own distillery down in that patch of woods.”

“Back when you were using your own wings, the way the people tell it,” Miklos bringing glasses and bottles. “We never quite got used to you being mixed up with that Spanish guy.”

“Aha,” Daphne lifting her glass, “I knew it, romance in the air.”

“I was still only a subdeb, too busy breezin’ through the season, disrupting lives, and thinking I was so seductive.

Then one night in Berlin, at the Femina-Palast, I think, though Porfi recalls it otherwise, I was approached by this slick-haired tango juvenile in an all-black turnout, you could say unpromising relationship material, you know the sort, no point risking even a distant nod unless a gal’s confident enough she can handle herself through any escapade, which in those days I thought I was.

My error and oh sister was it.” Suddenly up close came this thin mustache, high collar, an elegant briquet snapped open, suavely extended, a sleek art deco–shaped flame…

How can a girl resist, she wondered, just audibly enough, and didn’t, finding herself dancing some Gardel and Le Pera number with the as it turned out notorious Porfirio del Vasto, doing business at the time under a different name that no longer comes to mind.

“Gracious,” Daphne pretending to fan herself, “how soon is the movie coming out?”

“My undoing,” Glow with a comparably sincere sigh.

“The gyro, that damn loud billowing thing, is what did the trick, more than Porfirio himself, even when I could hear him over the noise, murmuring, ‘I couldn’t let one go for any less than such and such,’ and ‘I’d consider monthly installments, if we can agree on the interest,’ which I’m hearing as playfully coded romantic declarations…

“Smooth? George Raft could’ve taken lessons. Shows you how desperate for attention a girl can get.”

“Couldn’t’ve been that bad, could it?”

“There were moments. Our honeymoon in Mallorca…really something, would you like to hear the details? They’re sure engraved in my memory, I can tell you.”

“OK with me if you care to skip it.”

“I’ll take that as please do go on, oh very well, if you insist…”

—

Daphne finds herself next day almost relieved to be clamorously back in the air, moving at pretty much the altitude and speed of lucid dreaming, slipping along the terrain so unexpectedly close below, fields of cloud stretching away like prairie, then all at once a hell of a lot of trees.

Glow’s laughter streaming across the altitudes like a white silk aviator’s scarf.

A cloud comes out of nowhere to enfold them.

Glow cuts the engine and they volplane through.

In the relative quiet, they can hear bells of livestock from somewhere below, conversation among invisible steeplejacks whom they seem to be hurtling through this zero visibility within feet of, apt at any moment to hit a hillside, self-impale on a treetop—

Then abruptly out again into blessed sun glare, sky blue, Glow starts up the engine again…the racket resumes.

Late in the day as factory shifts are ending, commercial windows catching the last fume-broken rays of the sun suggestive as fortune-telling card layouts no one here quite looks upward to read.

Another sizable country town, once believed safe, independent, overrun by the War and broken, left to a diminished history in its seldom traveled corner of the old empire.

“Quite a few of them out here, take your pick.”

Evening falls, the gyro goes sailing into and through a Searchlight District where public lamps of varying colors and intensities abound, thickets of electric arc beams crossing from every roof, prismatic, cylindrical, masses of shadow, flanges and vanes of light.

Daphne and Glow have found one of the few cafés to remain open after dark. The garish sky above like an anxiously held breath.

“For the moment it’s enough work just trying to stay away from Porfirio, meaning away from Spain. He has this notion that Spain is my destiny.”

“Meaning that he is?”

“I’m not so sure. I keep running into these psychical types, readers into the future, all telling me I’m on the way to…

some kind of anarchist sainthood. Spain supposedly being known for its anarchists the way other countries are for their wine, their cooking, or the quality of whoopee within their borders.

There’s also the church, the military, the old dictator Primo de Rivera, his son who’s putting together his own phalanx of Fascists.

Hatred between the Right and the Left gets worse every day, Asturias is ready to explode.

Soon as I can get hold of a tommy gun I’m just going out before breakfast and start shooting Fascists. ”

“Not very saintlike.”

“Gets worse. I’m nearsighted too. Maybe you think these are pilot goggles—nope, they’re glasses, and even with them on, I’m a terrible shot. I can just imagine myself trying to get cute in Spain, ‘But companera, no, you must not use this weapon, you are a danger to us all, to yourself.’ ”

Daphne is giving her a look saying, yes, but at the same time it’s not too late, you can still peel off from this sainthood trajectory you think you’re on, get back down here with the rest of us, remember what we have to wrestle with every day, before you just go blasting away into some vertical beyond.

At least take a vacation from El Smootho.

But is not about to start handing out free advice to any gun-happy autogyro pilot.

“Whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming, and right now it’s all I can do to get on with my life.

I don’t care to know more than I need to about the mysteries of time,” snorting briefly, lopsidedly smiling.

“You’re expecting spiritual wisdom from little G.

T. del V.? you’ll be waiting a long time, sucker. ”

—

Below them a cheerful march tune can be heard—mandolins, a concertina, a sort of amiable jangle to it all, a moving collective on their way to Fiume, young fighting-age men and women carrying banners with the old D’Annunzian slogan “Me ne frego,” another nostalgic descent on what used to be Hungary’s exit to the sea, rolling down into town together, down out of the Karst, to waterfront cafés, window boxes spilling over in scarlet turbulence.

In the distance, out past the breakwater, evening pleasure steamers in the Quarnero bound to and from different islands.

“I can drop you here in Fiume,” Glow offers, “you may have some business here.”

“Glow. You’ve heard something.”

“Fish-market intelligence. Something to do with motorcycle traffic.”

Her heart jumps but she pretends to gaze at the Adriatic, “Can’t help noticing that good-size stretch of water there. On the off chance I’m fed up at last with the fool’s errand you found me mixed up in, this might also be a good place to kiss it off and catch a liner the hell on out of.”

“Come, come, no way for a cheez princess to talk, keep that chin up, lady.”

“Sure, so somebody can take another swing at it.”