In Partial Disgrace (26 page)

“You don’t even know
what
your real name is, do you?” the lieutenant barked with exasperation, and to this Iulus managed a perfectly defenseless, docile, democratic, American shrug, equal parts dissent and submission, as feckless as those he had witnessed among the boys when handing out the pups. He was surely a quick study. Then he took the fine fish out of his boot and laid it on the table.

We led the golden pony down to the compound at dusk, where I had a devil of a time explaining to Iulus the sign at the gate: “No horseplay
.
” A great normalcy seemed to pervade everything. The barbed wire was strung loose. Kites flew. No one was peering out. No one looked in. The Astingi women were allowed in groups under guard to go down and do their washing in the river. The American sentries, wearing only sidearms, aimlessly wandered the perimeter, as if they were on their way to school.

The Astingi had already knocked out the windows and disassembled the prefab barracks, covering the doors with colorful capes and shawls, festooning the gray walls with great loops of sausages and braids of garlic. Cooking fires had been lit. Lambs were slaughtered and spitted, kettles burbled, piglets were gutted and baked. Melons, eggplant, leeks; red, green, and yellow peppers appeared from nowhere. The Astingi men in long skirts and their women in pantaloons passed long clay pipes between them. Their children, almost naked, played with tiny puzzles or read large thick books on their backs while a seven-dog orchestra woofed their woodwinds. As Shakespeare cultists as well as woman cultists, the Astingi were already throwing up stage wings for an open-air performance.

As a disorderly mass of starlings buried the sun, blackheaded whimpering gulls by the thousands descended on the bluish mists of the Mze. Skylarks rose with a whir, herons gazed coquettishly toward the vanished sun, and imperturbable rooks stalked off to the woods for the night. Then the reed-beds erupted in a
fortissimo
of song-duels, an ambuscade of lovelorn yearning, a clangor of male wailing and wanting which silenced the chorus of victory and the manly arts of war.

Iulus hobbled the blond pony loosely with a thong of crimson patent leather. The pony yawned, and as the bones in his face cracked, Iulus softly intoned an Astingi chant for me. “‘He who hath not seen the bird-pastures of the Mze / hath nothing seen / the whole world drinks from our river / the eyes of the sea. And whomsoever drinks from her / bottomless mists longs to return.’ You see,” he concluded with closed eyes, “it’s impossible to talk even for half an hour without the Mze coming into the conversation . . .” We embraced shyly and made plans for an early breakfast in the commissary. The war was over.

That night I dreamt our national bedtime story: begat by virtue, winning through virtue, earning the right to correct the world . . . and woke up in the middle of it, feverish and despairing.

He never appeared at breakfast and inquiries in the compound produced only hyperbolic shrugs and gaptoothed, golden grins. That was the last time for many years that I would see the agent called Iulus face to face, though we would shadow each other throughout our lifetimes and into something of the next. His self-confounded, mutilated little country has never been far from my thoughts since that day. I have yet to shake her pomegranate mud from my boots.

I went back to my bunk to make out my report. First impressions are most important, but it would take the rest of my life to sort them out. There is an immense relief in the knowledge that one actually knows nothing—that one can savor experience for itself, not because you can act upon it. Though my brain had collided with a labelless world, never before or since have my emotions been so lucid or distinct. I had been touched at all points. My empathy was, for once,
exact
. I opened the plaid valise and the Gladstone, and amongst the crumpled papers of the latter was a leatherbound volume,
Da Historae Astingae: An Internal Guide to the External Barbarian
. Each page was written in a different color ink, separated with dried leaves and herbs, and the incomparable female aromas of Cannonia made me giddy. But the Z-box was gone.

While the Astingi mounted an off-the-wall production of
Titus Andronicus
, the earliest and bloodiest of Shakespeare’s histories, from the first scene (“Alarbus’ limbs are lopt, and entrails feed the sacrificing fire”) to the last (“Set him breast-deep in earth, and famish him”), while the title character lost twenty-one sons in battle and personally dispatched another on stage, I was a merry genius for a week. What greater joy than to write without having to revise! I detailed the flora, fauna, and spiritual furniture of Semper Vero, listing their strategic possibilities as our condominium in Terra XX, our pleasure seat in the barbarian lands. I prayed that my well-fed American buttonhead might be pasted in brief appearance in that custodial lineage of tragic golden faces. And at the same moment, I vowed to desert from that army of Americans who would swarm over the world with answers, learning nothing.

Yes, there is a coffin coming. But I cannot tell you now who was in it.

EX LIBRIS

(Iulus and Aufidius)

Father wrote every evening in his
Historae Astingae: An Internal Guide to
the External Barbarian
, disguised as a “Guidebook for Travelers” in order to make a market for it. Working at top speed, he usually produced about one hundred and twenty sentences of impossible terseness per night. Behind his mahogany swivel chair there was a large table with sixteen chessboards that formed one huge board, lined with the standing pieces. The pieces stood there summer after summer, intermingling as time went on. I do not know with whom he played, nor what happened in the game. They may have served simply as paperweights. He explained the rules to me, but his attitude was that once I knew the rules, it was not necessary to play. The incomprehensibility of the game was apparently its most important feature.

Sometimes he permitted me to stay with him while he worked, provided I was absolutely silent. I sat next to him at the edge of the desk, with my slender wit and unmoved disposition, drawing convoluted schoolboy clouds as the books which surrounded us, interlocked and overlapped, flowed back and forth into one another like sea anemones or the Mze itself. And when he got up to consult a reference or simply to pace up and down, I stared at the folio next to me, its half-completed sentences looping away like a thin line of ponies on the horizon, inviting me to run down, ride them, pull hair from their manes.

I did not know then that writers give away everything that is original to them, and are always in danger of losing their whole substance. Writers are people who have exhausted themselves; only the dregs of them still exist. Writing is so real it makes the writer unreal; a nothing. And if one resists being a nothing, one will have the greatest difficulty in finishing anything.

Nor did I know that in his hyperfastidious, shamelessly private mind, he was envisioning a nonexistent genre. For no one ever writes the book he imagines; the book becomes the death mask of creation, it has its own future and survives like a chicken dancing with its head cut off. And the spy knows this better than anyone; to write anything down is to take colossal risk. In life you can mask your actions, but once on paper, nothing can hide your mediocrity.

So, Valued Traveler, while your papers are being visaed and your baggage searched, put aside your imaginings, your idle curiosity, and your fear of discomfort in a strange land. I came here like yourself many years ago as a young man, and while not completely accepted to this day, have become a resident, raised a family, invented a profession, and benefitted not a little from the local culture. I have surveyed every romantic scene, gathered every mountain flower, measured every valley, and drawn conclusions as to what was excellent and what might be improved.

It is the humble duty of this writer to collect under all the varieties of circumstance such materials as may supply a groundwork for connected history and for general deduction. The reader who seeks elaborate political disposition, or the amusement derived from private anecdote, will be disappointed. Where it was thought necessary to go beyond the sphere of personal observation, German authorities of established merit have been relied upon. It was at one time intended to subjoin a sketch of the literature of the country. But upon this interesting subject it is not possible to write with a hasty pen. Cannonian letters are too extensive to be compressed, and it was not without great reluctance the author relinquished this object, being sensible that the true spirit and condition of a nation can never be appreciated without some insight into the progress of its literary culture. He trusts, however, that the design which is deferred will not be forgotten, and anticipates with much pleasure those hours in which he may pursue his labors upon the subject.

The Traveler must look to other guides if he is interested in the minor promotions of Greek or Italian genius, or the ruins of military/ecclesiastical misadventures. There will be no chronological list of potentates. Indeed, Cannonia is a kingdom in which the person of the Sovereign has always been difficult to determine. The writer must further confess that he is not an artist of any sort, but an amateur enthusiast of the profound, the beautiful, and the sublime, so now increasingly out of fashion—nor does he confuse the authority of the aesthetical genius with the political ambitions which often encourage it, which seems to be our intelligensias’ only fascination. Nor am I anything of a philosopher. Dialectics do not interest me, though like ballsports, I am very good at them. I neither write a system nor promise a system, not do I subscribe or ascribe anything to a system. My only expertise is in the finality of love. I intend, nonetheless, to make my reputation good with you, as I have acquired, at no little expense, the Cannonian taste of seeing things for what they are.

RUBATO AND NIMBUS

(Iulus)

By this time Father could do no wrong in the Professor’s eyes, the doctor seizing upon each success in the field with an enthusiasm tinged by self-deprecatory remarks about his own researches:

“It’s just as well we’re friends, otherwise I should burst with envy.” Or, “You really ought to write this up, you know. It would make a great impression on the masses.”

Moreover, Father’s indifference had the odd effect of cheering him.

“It’s merely an amateur’s business,” Father sniffed, “and at any rate, I don’t live to publish my brain.”

One day, when the Professor was waxing particularly effusive about a schnauzer whose mania for shredding had been softened measurably, he blurted out, “Let’s leave off the uglies, Councilor. You realize in all this time you haven’t really shown off your own animals. I want to see good dogs today, the
best
dogs—the emblem I should aspire to!”

Father took off his hat, lowered his head, and looked directly at his esteemed friend’s heart, as if to gauge his sincerity. Then he took a step backward and looked him up and down.

“Very well,” he spoke in measured tones, “but you deserve nothing less than the whole play. And it’s spring, you know. Man isn’t up to any good, and neither is nature.”

The difference between them, after all, was that the Professor truly believed he was the first mortal to set foot into the mind, and like every true colonial assumed that mere priority allowed him to name it and submit it to his laws. My father, who had preceded him there and left as rapidly as he could, knew with his layman’s tick that what you give your name to only makes you liable for its eventual perversions, and that while the ferns of the world may give way around your stride, they immediately pop back up, covering your tracks as though you never passed. Father also, in retrospect, had made an elemental mistake, not realizing that the exercise of personal modesty, which had won my mother, does not often work as well with men, for modesty in men is simply inverted pride. The Professor was not content with intimacy, but only unreserved mutual admiration, and my father believed that he could wean him from this course.

It was in this spirit that Felix summoned Rubato and Nimbus, models of the Chetvorah, parented by Sirius and Isisirene, the brightest constellation yet projected on the dome of dogdom. Brother and sister, they could hardly be distinguished from one another at two years of age, save for Rubato’s gallant poise, which made him the better pointer, and the passionate devotion of Nimbus, which made her an indefatigable retriever.

Returning the schnauzer to the kennels, we walked around to the rear of the house and down the lawn to Cherith’s Brook. Father turned on his heel, gazing back to the tower of his den, and blew two syllables on a silver whistle, a bass and a deeper quartertone, the second phrase of Schubert’s
Unfinished
. Immediately the pair appeared on the den’s balcony (as usual, they had flung themselves with a sob under his desk upon his departure), and then with tempered passion they flashed across the southern sky, turning extraordinary caprioles in the air. Emerging from a circular pool behind a cypress hedge, then bolting through the broken garden gate, they stormed toward us, unfolding their forces as their wet ribcages realigned with each stride—flews loose, underlips shortened, teeth gleaming in the sun.

The Professor’s heart had dropped when they leapt, fearing the worst, and now it did again as their clear-veined legs and drawn-in haunches seemed to promise more than virile virtue, bringing back the awe and helplessness he had felt at the Cossack-like charge of the Astingi boy on his pony.

The animal’s bodies lurched on a centrifugal plane like dervishes, and as they neared us, rather than stopping, they took on the masters (Rubato attending the Hauptzuchtwart, Nimbus the stranger) with a sudden upward lunge, snapping at the men’s faces as if to bite their noses off. The Professor had already recoiled, but as the jaws of Nimbus passed by his head, she planted a floating air-kiss on his lips, half-tenderly, half-mischievously, beslobbering his defensive, outthrust arm. Then began the dance of welcome and salutation—prodigious waggings of hindquarters, violent tugs of muscles, rapid tramplings, daring vaults, annular contractions, far-flung leaps, and the indubitable claw-flamenco.

Their cut tails were vibrating to quick-time, their rosy riffled mouths exposed. Then Father quietly spoke their favorite words—“
Ru-ba-to, Nimbus
”—and with a single leap they were at his side, shoulder blades against his shinbones like statues, each with a white whorl on its chest. Father put them in a double-harness, and without another word we set off for the forest where the juiciest ferns grow thick and the deer congregate to escape the midday heat. The birds stopped singing.

Our forests were not the true trackless type, the only true remnants of which exist in northern Russia and northmost America, but in fact were leafy islands cut from fields to shield the springs and water sources. Before the Great War you could move a thousand kilometers east and rarely be a hundred yards from drinking water, and by carefully picking its portages across the sterile fields, a full column of horsemen could remain in shade for days at a time. The emphasis had always been to extract game from the brutal and never bucolic forms of agriculture, circumventing those bound to the garner of the land—a never-ending battle to wrest trees from the peasant’s poaching axe and the magnate’s long saw.

“Ah, to live in harmony with the land,” the Professor let slip as he picked his way about the cowpats.

“Stand for a day with a shepherd dog, my friend,” Felix riposted, “and we shall see what becomes of your mind. You could turn all the Germanies into a gymnasium and not restore it. For a landscape to have grandeur, it must have a bit of nonsense.”

Then he discoursed on why nature is anything but natural:

“One must work incessantly so that the landscape is neither diminished nor allowed to revert to uncontrolled growth. A constructive edge which is not impenetrable but in which one can hide takes many men to create, many lifetimes, many tricks and sacrifices, so that you can get close to a bird who has survived all history with the latecomer, the dog, who it took eight thousand years to train just to eat out of his own dish.”

Father had this theory, as far as I know unrefuted, that every nation takes the structure of its mind from the nature of its forest, whether it be the diagonal rows of the French
bocage
and its filtered crystalline light, making the informal formal; the dense darkness of the Teuton wood, where the trees die top down and the canopy seems made of gnarled roots; the ever-correct English copses, memorial to the vanished forest of thieves and adventurers; or the single druidical cypress worshiped by Mediterraneans—as well as those ancient civilizations where the austerity of intellect is apparently the result of having no trees at all, but only unaesthetical shrubbery, not to speak of jungles where rarity is homogeneity; the Russian taiga of birch, pine, and rowan whose inwardness is so palpable and passive; and finally the American backwoods, the richest botanically but the most slovenly kept, its most prominent feature stumps, which exist chiefly to hide broken, discarded toys—toys, they say, made of everything but wood.

The woods in our part of the world corresponded well to the human state for which they were intended: islands of secrecy, preserved from the
snip, snip, snip
of agricultural routine. Not even centuries of war could destroy these covens, though one man within his lifetime, in the interest of a few handfuls of grain or kindling, could do more damage than the most violent of autocratic contests. And the Professor, because he knew that animals returned to die there, misunderstood these patches of woods as dark places inhabited by goblins and other terrible forces, whereas in reality, as Father patiently explained, they were full of disappointments and surprises, but not to be feared, because men don’t die there.

“We die out in the open,” he murmured as if in a trance, “when we forsake cover, out in the plain geometry of our own devising, making those banal rows of sweet little pods just like a cemetery. When the earth is pulverized and floats away with the rain and the green lines of mesmeric shoots appear, that’s when men must take cover, for it is in the spring when he begins to hallucinate at his own handiwork and builds his grave of vegetables.” It was the fields, not the woods, where the human experiment was out of control, and that was the delicate point he was prepared to enforce that day.

When rhetorically upstaged, the Professor would often opt for a kind of radical response, in this case arguing that hunting was an outdated ritual to appease one’s vanity, an attempt to reconnect “bourgeois thinking” with its nobler antecedents, and “a stupid contest to determine who was the manliest man in all Klavierland.” But Felix disarmed him with selective candor.

“What you say is true enough,” he said, “yet ninety-nine percent of our existence has been spent doing just that. I do not pretend to live in harmony with the land; the point is to distance oneself gradually from it, to make it an object of curiosity and pleasure. It’s woods alone that are worth hoodwinking for, my dear Hebraist; nevertheless, we take your point. And now, if you will, attend to mine.”

The day was bright for my father’s display, as always prodigal but without fanfare. Rubato and Nimbus were released but made not the slightest lunge as the leash was uncoupled. They followed him two meters off each of his heels, watching the telltale arch of his booted foot, trading for the time being their poor eyes for his superior vantage, height, and peripheral vision. Climbing the embankment of a drainage ditch, the Professor already panting, we appeared on a stubbled rise and overlooked a field of wheat bordered at its furthest reach by what seemed an incommensurably dense line of forest. It was mostly ash, if a name tells you anything, a crippled bit of nature with billows of vegetation cascading about gnarled boles, a profusion of wild vines which reached to the very top of the trees and turned black in the winter, hard as barbed wire.

Father’s right heel raised slightly, the precondition for firing, though he carried no gun—all he had to do was show the dogs the key to the gun cabinet for them to know the direction of the day. When his heel reached half an inch off the ground, Rubato and Nimbus dropped to their bellies, arched their necks, and cocked their heads ever so slightly in order to peer calmly around his calves. The Professor’s eyes had a hint of gray awe. My father spoke slowly, cradling his imaginary, redundant gun:

“This is the opposite of suggestion, but an exercise in cooperation, reinforcing our worst senses with the best of others. The point is to define what is in reach and beyond reach, and gradually, with luck, to push back the confines of the inaccessible. That’s the part of the story which is always missed.”

As he spoke, he bent slightly at the knees, and with a single wave of his hand, the dogs sprang up and plunged in tandem into the sea of green wheat.

“As pure athletes they are the best that ever lived,” he went on. “They lack some of the nostalgic virtues, perhaps, but no one ever moved with such alacrity.”

Now their noses were my father’s eyes. The Chetvorah knifed through the grain at full speed, his eyes following their skulls. The vast field for them became a simple frame which they divided into quadrants, galloping across each other’s black wakes in the green ocean, turning figure-eights like torpedo boats. Every few moments they leapt straight up to check their bearings, and while suspended in midair, with a slight coy turning of their heads caught the angle of my father’s hands, which cast them out further along vectors of his composing. He disdained the human voice and all the apparatus of verbs, horns, whistles, and thunder-clubs, and in this way, without a mote of wasted energy, mapped the sea of grass until the Chetvorah had fully quartered it, drinking everything in.

The Professor watched this, squinted, bunching his shoulders, and let out a long sigh as the dogs reached the forest line without putting up a single bird. Then, wheeling in circles of disappointment, their purpose waning, they began to work their way back to us in desuetude.

“Birds don’t eat lunch,” Father said by way of explanation, “but deer do,” and then, shaping his hands into a great parentheses, framed the final scene for the Professor. “Watch this well and with respect.”

His hands flicked out, all ten fingers, and the dogs, caught short, turned
volte face
and began to work the forest edge, though one could sense the momentum had been broken, a few of the invisible threads between us snapped by the stress of an elegant search gone unrewarded. An element of hesitation, even boredom, was apparent in their gait even to an untrained observer. Nevertheless they kept working the edge in tandem, throwing up divots of earth in their indignation, and then their perfect figure-eights began to oscillate as one of them—Rubato, I thought—veered off at a tangent, ears flapping, in the kind of heavy, jazzy canter of a horse broken from its traces, or a duck breaking formation with a few pellets in its wing. With one ear carelessly turned inside out, he loped obliquely, hindlegs moving somewhat to the side, as some tremendous emotion began to seize him. Every nerve taut, one foreleg and one hindleg paused in the air, he peered with cocked head into the hollows as the flaps of his erected ears fell forward on both eyes. Nimbus backed him with fine deliberation, her bobbed tail waving furiously, both drunk with their own identity. Rubato wobbled left and right, then started, which jerked his head in rash recoil against his chest and in recovering almost tore his head from his shoulders. The spore of the deer had floated from the forest and dropped like a regimental flag before them.

“Now there is only one chance left, very small,” Father whispered, still holding his cupped and inverted palms before the Professor’s glistening face. “We will see if Rubato has it in him to self-correct.”

Nimbus was still locked in the semblance of a pattern, wheeling through the conflicting signals, walking the edge, and still vaguely aware that my father’s hands could reach her. But then with a shudder she broke off, not to the deer—a furtive stag with a broken rack and yellowish-white scut which had just broken from the thicket—but to her runaway brother’s trail. The dogs accelerated now faster than ever, a breakneck berserker pace, and disappeared into the forest, galloping with teeth set and howling inwardly.