In Partial Disgrace (13 page)

“Oh, I should say that there is more affection operating here than one would think,” Felix said. “Behavior is created
despite
commands. It is external to them.”

“What does one do,” the Professor almost shouted, “when a patient is so, so . . .
schtupid
!”

“It means only that we must extend our sympathies.”

“Then we need stronger subjects!” the Professor barked gruffly. “Perhaps he is only seeking rest,” Father said ingenuously. “Perhaps he only wants you to serve him. His very misery, by gratifying his sense of guilt, may contribute to his recovery.”

The Professor reflected upon this without a word.

Felix took Wolf from the enclosure. Once outside, the dog abruptly offered his undamaged paw, holding it stiffly like an Eastern diplomat. His nose was red and crossed diagonally with white stripes of scar tissue. His vulnerability was almost sunny. Then, suddenly, without command, he sat.

“This might be as good as it gets,” Felix opined.

“Damn good!” the Professor shouted, and not long after, with the Dresden necklace displayed upon his chest, Wolf did go down, though he could not help peeing slightly and refused to break eye contact.

“I really must take a walk before dinner,” the Professor said into the triumphant silence, and Felix saw at once that he needed to be alone.

“We will sound the bell, of course,” Father said, as Wolf reentered and kissed his kennel’s earth.

Once alone, the Professor meandered back toward the house, only to emerge at once with his suitcase, and from there proceed down the towpath toward the fields. I followed him, keeping to the woods, watching from the edge like a pheasant. A quarter-mile out into the muddy wasteland he set down the suitcase, opened it, and began to make a small tent of papers on the ground. Then he touched his cigar to them, and a thin coil of smoke rose up in the violet dusk. He selected each paper carefully, leaving the majority in the suitcase, and once, after snatching one from the flames, plunged it into a puddle. He watched the tiny fire flicker out, leaving a smoldering scallop which he closed within the suitcase, then folded his arms in a self-satisfied shrug. The dinner bell sounded, as always at six p.m. on Sundays, and I glanced up. Mother was pulling the bell rope with one hand as she held a pair of field glasses with the other.

I waited until the Professor had disappeared up the path, then ran out to the smoldering site. Among the embers a few unburned scraps remained, and I snatched them out. Then I raced back to the house, mounted the stairs three at a time to Father’s lair, and placed the charred runes in a secret drawer which I had discovered in his desk.

As I came down the main staircase for dinner, I saw the Professor emerging from the guest bath in an improved mood, though somewhat unsteady.

The Professor’s actions had been inspired by Öscar Ögur, the family gardener. One rainy Sunday while we were eating lunch, old illiterate Öscar entered and asked my father if we had a letter to post. Father took a pen from one of his innumerable pockets, jotted a postcard to someone, and handed it over without a word. Öscar disappeared, and when he came back a short time later, my mother had set out a piece of cake for him. He sat at the corner of the table eating it silently, then took his leave. His manner was hunchbacked, though technically he wasn’t. In response to an inquiry from the Professor, Father explained that Öscar made himself useful by posting letters, and had fed himself in this way since he was a boy.

The simplicity and efficacy of this made a great impression on the Professor, who spent the rest of that Sunday following Öscar around, much to the annoyance of the locals, who were perfectly happy to assist Öscar and catch up with their correspondence, but not in the shadow of a man with those eyes, brown as the Mze itself, hovering in the background under a homburg.

This social arrangement whereby the deranged assisted the bureaucracy interested the Professor greatly, though he was irritated at being unable to observe Öscar under more controlled conditions, and his few attempts at conversation with the fellow produced only a gentle but opaque smirk on the far left side of Öscar’s face.

One of the rituals he observed was to affect him for the rest of his life, though, as well as bring him into conflict with Mother.

It was later in the afternoon that same Sunday, as the Professor followed Öscar back to the stone chicken house behind the chapel where he slept. Öscar had gathered flowers from the many gardens on the way, making a small bouquet using only those at the peak of their bloom. (On this day it was iris and peony.) Once home, he pulled out a three-legged campstool to support his asymmetrical buttocks, and there he proceeded to light the flowers on fire one by one. Occasionally he inhaled the crackling smoke, but mostly it seemed not to register with him. When queried, Father claimed to know nothing of the significance of this activity, nor did it interest him, being one of Öscar’s more harmless idiosyncrasies. But on his next visit the Professor arrived with an extra valise, and after greeting Wolf with a wave, strode out on stiffened legs into the sugar beet field, where he sat down and unloaded a stack of papers, which he proceeded to burn one by one with much the same expression as Öscar did the flowers.

Father never questioned his friend about this, though every once in a while as he was working the dogs a charred piece of paper would blow across his path and he would pick it up, noting crossed-out sentences, circled inkblots, phrases such as “noxious inadequacy,” and strange quasi-mathematical diagrams of mental states which looked rather like medieval routes of pilgrimage to Spain. Irritated both at the litter and the presumption behind it, Felix placed these singed thoughts in the appropriate pocket. Only later did I find out where he kept them.

Our octagonal dining room was typical Central Empire, the feet of the table those of lions standing on cannonballs, its legs Corinthian columns inlaid with vermeil
trompe l’oeil
griffins chasing an auroch up a pylon. On each wall was a locked glass breakfront: one for everyday china (a blue and chrome yellow pattern, the primary colors of Astingi eyes), one for Mother’s family figurines, one for the most enigmatic of Father’s collectibles (Roman coins, corded drinking beakers, stone axes, tobacco jars) and one of course for guns. A dozen or so firearms were displayed left to right in order of technological development, beginning with Grandfather Priam’s double-hammered Arabic horse guns, and ending with his custom-built drillings for the Marchlands, always three-barreled, their two-shot chambers snuggled around a high-caliber 30.6 rifle, blending English lightness with Krupp steel. All were distinctively strapped, the leather band making the guns ugly and military but testifying to the difficulty of Cannonian terrain, where the emphasis had to be on the intelligence of the dog and the stamina of the hunter. For despite the profusion of game in the Marchlands, the footing was so difficult you rarely had a gun at the ready—indeed, the weapon was almost an afterthought. The Astingi gunsmiths produced weapons of clarity and balance which clung to your body like a burr, and which when brought up to fire seemed merely a line drawn between your cheekbone and index finger. Such a gun almost pointed itself. It swung on its own weight and lay in your hand without pressure, though it kicked mightily. When fired, the stock bit into your shoulder like a wolverine, which clamps down on its prey only once. The first time I fired one, the recoil struck me late and deep, somewhere close to the heart. From that day on, I knew I would be no happy shooter, as I would always anticipate the pain.

Unusually, Father had given the Professor his choice of seats at the table—in essence, a choice of which vitrine and which collection to stare into. As with everything, the Professor took this seriously and systematically, and finally, reflecting a predictable response to weaponry—revulsion combined with fascination—chose to face the guns, a seat he never relinquished throughout thirty years as a guest in our home. It was not lost upon us that despite the reform laws, as a Jew he was still prohibited from owning a gun.

“I suppose that when Wolf is stabilized we will accustom him to firearms?” the Professor offered eagerly after the soup.

Father rejoined that any dog could be taught to hunt, but to find game was the point, and Wolf’s reflex heritage was to always be on the defensive, on the off chance that a quail might turn on his pursuer and threaten his family.

“The only usefulness of a gun is the extent to which it can bring out hypocrisy,” he finished, as the vermillion roast arrived. “Also as a pretext, usually the only one, for fathers and sons to discourse on sex and death under the guise of safety regulations.”

“The shotgun is the essence of the bourgeois sensibility, I’m told,” the Professor said laconically, eyeing the fine drillings before him.

“Ah, yes,” Father replied drily, “the rise of the uncomfortable middle class, so much remarked upon and so little explained.” Addressing the hostile intellectual’s inquiry, he then took the occasion to launch into one of his mock dialogues.

“Suddenly a new man appears in the forest!” he chortled. “A new class of foot hunter who disdains the horses, beaters, and specialized pursuits of the nobility. For a time, life is given meaning by nothing more than avoiding the perversions of the English aristocracy! The professional classes then begin to bear arms in the guise of putting food on the table, but as any fool knows, the elegant cylinders which stand in the corner represent only the lost spirit of insurrection. To the naïve, Professor, such weapons might appear as a sign of the residual eagerness of a citizenry eager to protect its liberties, or for the man of the family to ward off the violent, random stranger. But in fact the shotgun is a symbol of failed revolution, a reminder how little private armament matters.”

“A display, really, of terrible fragility and sadness,” Mother added, “for brandishing a gun is only a futile effort to turn your enemy for a moment into a reflective sort, so that you might take him by surprise, slip your hand into the fold, and grab him by the nose! There is nothing more pathetic, really, than the sight of a lone man with a long gun.”

The Professor was all ears as he watched his head float in the vitrine’s reflection, a ghost among the guns. The fact was that Father rarely carried a gun and almost never shot one. He only cleaned and fondled them. This wasn’t for a lack of prowess. He had inherited Grandfather Priam’s unflustered eye along with his armory, but something had happened in his thirties. There was a rumor about a friend accidentally killed on a hunt, but more likely it had to do with the newly systematized slaughter, which made it necessary for him to register a gesture of non-compliance. For a time he hunted alone, but with the increasing number of hunters each autumn, plus the arrival of German dentist sportsmen and Frenchmen who abandoned their dogs in the Hycernian Forest after the season, he gave it up.

I did not understand then that most of the uglier things in our time could be explained not in terms of some tragic accident, policy error, or moral misunderstanding, but simply due to the increase in the number of people about. More people everywhere, even in the deepest forest of the most remote country, blasting away every Sunday. Anyone with two horses was a sportsman, and if he won the race, a noted one. People began to hunt without restraint, killing irrespective of age, sex, or season. The few escaping creatures were then harassed without interval by packs of ill-trained hounds. Bags of the murdered—stiff, hairy, blood-encrusted, with lustrous eyes—were exported by the thousands as the hordes faded into the night with their snifters of cognac, the unscrewed anuses of their horses dropping moist smoking balls on every road.

“And what pleasure can one possibly derive from killing a defenseless animal?” The Professor issued his challenge across the salad. Felix only smiled. Ainoha snorted and rustled her petticoats.

“Unlike us, Doctor, the dog has no blood scent,” Father replied in his patient way. “He works only to please his master, and whether it’s a tennis ball or a golden eagle is of no concern to him. Hunting is a matter of sharing senses, of complementary cooperation, which is intrinsically beautiful. There is no victim, no victor, no bounty, no prize, no score. There is neither sport nor spectator.”

“And not to eat it?” The Professor spat this out between mouthfuls, as if such aesthetical athleticism could be the final word.

“Our guest ought not concern himself so much with food gathering,” Mother interjected not too calmly. “It’s a sort of fetish with you, if I may say.”

“One supposes,” Father continued, sawing away at the roast, “that our shadowy guttural ancestors perhaps hunted for food once or twice in the dead of winter. But they didn’t really begin to hunt in earnest until they endured the great trauma, when the wandering life had been given up and they bought the farm. When every man and every animal has his function in the social order written on his face, that is when the lonely man with his scruffy dog strikes out, not to recover the lost tribe, but to lose it. Do you really believe one could be intimate with something as inexpressive as a bird? That’s why intellectuals hate hunters, because intellectuals are still hunting their own lost tribe. In any event, you are missing the dynamics here. As soon as hunting becomes a spectacle, as soon as our dominion over the prey becomes absolute, it loses its purpose, which is why I gave it up. Intellectuals think hunting is a kind of war without guilt. It only has to do with securing the best places to hunt. Believe me, Professor, there’s no real skill involved. The dog does the work, and the prey consents. Guilt and rejoicing cancel each other out. It’s not a question of smelling, but of giving up your own smell.”

The Professor’s spoon had stopped in midair, but Father was relentless. “You fast, you smear yourself with alien substances to disguise the abominable stench of your humanness! You’re alive without your baggage. It hasn’t a thing to do with food or sport. It’s a way of losing the tribe, of
breaking
communion. Above all, it’s man’s way of escaping the family. No more powerful idea on this earth, let me tell you. And so history begins, Professor, when the man comes home from his stupid job, yells at his wife and children, kicks the dog in the behind, grabs his gun from the corner, and waves the bloody flag!”