Atdtda25: Loiter, linger, 697-698

[Paul Nightingale]

Cyprian is now at Trieste; we last saw him at Liverpool St station,
"wait[ing] ... for the terrible onset, the intestinal certainty that he
would never see [Yashmeen] again (504). His current occupation, it seems, is
"monitoring the docks and the emigrant traffic to America" (697); moreover,
he "must loiter all day at dockside", immobile but surrounded by movement.
Scenes in America often featured references to the influx of working-class
immigrants; and on 624 Willi Dingkopf warned Kit of "the millions now into
your own country they are streaming". The text here echoes Dingkopf's words
with "the daily streaming of souls" (697).

Such surveillance requires "detailed logs"; and here one might backtrack a
few pages to the end of Ch48 (also the final page of Bilocations, of course)
to Lew's thoughts on the kind of detective work he was doing, the "release
from a bad contract" (693; also see 688-689 for his two kinds of detective).
However, Cyprian has shed "false utterings in a number of hands" and
"returned to his schoolboy's script, to distant Evensongs ..." etc (697).
One imagines this erases the phase of his life that includes Cambridge and
Yashmeen, just as his subsequent interest in sailors will supersede any
earlier obsession with Yashmeen. He is himself in exile, observing the
movements of those about to go into exile; and so he takes refuge of sorts
in memory. Some emigrants are "travelling in disguise" to evade the
surveillance practised by Cyprian, who reclaims some kind of authentic
self-identity as he records the movements of others.

The section ends suddenly at the top of 698. Cyprian is no longer
"loiter[ing]" but "still lingering", reluctant to move, held in place by
"[t]he promise of the evening"; his attention is now on sailors (ie those
who work) as opposed to those travelling (who, by association, include
Yashmeen).