In Partial Disgrace (12 page)
Across the deadly swath of uprooted trees, great clouds of multicolored dust and leaves spiraled across the lime green bog which always threatened to engulf the country. Enormous yews, disfigured either by human ignorance or malice, their untrimmed tops whirling out of control like inverted peacocks, formed a living tsuga colonnade racked with brown spot. The dogs had bolted down a path, leading us to the “Chinese Pavilion,” a ruin large enough to quarter half a cavalry regiment, where the vista opened across meadows full of wildflowers to a plain where the glacier had given itself up in an ice meadow. “An arm of the lost inland sea,” Iulus noted with satisfaction, pointing out a series of spheroidal boulders which seemed to have been dispersed with great care. They lay in glistening clumps like stiffened eggwhites, as if pieces of cumulus had fallen to earth, in what appeared to be the remnants of a long abandoned golfcourse, crossed and recrossed by a rutted brown road overhung with weeping witchhazel. Below us, he explained with an air of detached melancholy, stretched the valley of the White Vah, a gash between two ridges of Paleozoic minerals, where phyllites and porphyroids had been mined from time immemorial. We traversed the almost vertical slopes, dotted with ilex, olive, and wild rhubarb, and punctuated with rills and torrents. As we crossed and recrossed the rough bed of a cataract with very low water, I noticed that this was the only place, since I had entered the country where there was no wind at all. “The climate is such that we could have marginally supported oranges and lemons,” Iulus concluded. “But no one with a true interest in nature and the cycles of the seasons would consciously cultivate the soft androgyny of the Mediterranean. Wouldn’t you say?”
His English was so precise and Anglophone that it was intimidating. The only indication that Iulus was a foreigner, apart from the usual troubles with “th” and “w,” and an occasional word which took on a guttural German ring, was his studied avoidance of the more inflected vowels of Oxonian cadences, as if to acknowledge the superior oral manners of a certain intellectual class, while at the same time disapproving of it. He took great delight in coming up with exact technical terms, emitting a prideful smile when searching for a colloquial phrase and finding it convincing. “Buckeye!” he roared, gesticulating at a huge horsechestnut. “That’s what
you
would call it, no?” To an American ear, it was as if the English language had been written for brass. And each syllable had the clarity of a note struck with a mallet.
The dogs led us through a switchback of crimson rhododendron and we emerged overlooking the manor. It was bordered by two great bodies of water, one free-flowing and clear as a trout stream, the other completely stagnant and silted, without so much as a mayfly’s ripple. “One of my grandfather’s projects,” Iulus declared offhandedly, “the result of a pub bet. You see before you a river in which you
can
step twice.”
“Did he win?” I offered cheerfully. “Hard to say. It might have been on a technicality; one can step in it twice, but only once? I used to believe that Heraclitus was wrong because we all bathe in the same river of Time, ever more limpid and ever deeper at the selfsame point of its flowing. But now I believe him wrong because you cannot step in it even once. Is there a word in English,” he mused, “for a contradiction in which both conflicting propositions are false?”
My mind scuttled along like a lost lizard as I looked away.
(Iulus)
The Professor returned to Semper Vero every second Sunday, met punctually each time by the golden horse and a different type of conveyance from our large collection, though on some occasions he rented his own gig and piebald mare, without driver, from the Skopje. And in those months Wolf was indeed improving, walking tall, though fits of hauling would still come over him without warning as he gulped horseturds by the bucketful.
It was agreed that in the interim each of them would be free to practice their competing therapies upon the dog in question, on the assumption that any deviation from his present neurasthenia could only be a step in the right direction, and that in defiance of Hippocrates’s Oath, any treatment would be better than nothing.
My father had seen at once that Wolf, like Scharf, was a hopeless case whom only the most intensive treatment and objective attention would make remotely palatable, and that a cure in any acceptable sense was impossible. He knew the only hope lay not in therapies, but in that as the Professor’s love for the animal became stronger, his expectations would be fewer.
Wolf did not intrigue him. Felix knew his own courting would be halfhearted, and that the dog would pick it up immediately. His suspicion was that Wolf ’s unwillingness to please ought to be respected and cataloged, even though it would not produce so much as a footnote in the glories of insanity. The dog simply had an Asian acceptance of the kennel, preferring the clean barter between prisoners and wardens to the stresses of demonstrating constant alertness and educability. His merry fellows in the adjacent runs he wouldn’t give so much as a sideways glance. Perhaps he half-thought he deserved incarceration, Felix speculated.
To Father’s credit, he tried to develop more subtle commands using an old Astingi training lexicon in which there were over a thousand words, or rather sounds, for “Down!” this on the theory that if both patient and trainer could achieve a “Down!” without terminal consequences, it might by confidence bring the dog back from death’s door—in other words, the animal, in recognizing a bottom, might respond with a kind of spiritual bounce.
But even in the far richer Astingi (so dense it could turn any phrase into its exact opposite), he noted there was no command for “danger,” just as there was no command to live. “Down” was all there was, a kind of drug in which dosage was everything, a thousand slightly different intonations of the same metaphor.
Wolf for his part seemed to very much enjoy this chorus of a thousand “down”s. It was a kind of music to him, and he bobbed his head in time, wagging his broken tail, once even performing a kind of Russian dance, which was the only time his hindlegs stopped quivering. But he never so much as sat, even while all around him the Chetvorah, even the nine-week-old pups, flattened themselves happily upon the earth at the Astingi intonations.
Clearly, the libretto of his own opera did not interest Wolf, and to actually take such language seriously would have been a serious offense to his aesthetic sensibilities. Felix took the precaution of keeping the water bucket at a low level so the animal could not drown himself.
On each of his visits, the Professor would go directly to Wolf ’s kennel, clap him in a soldierly embrace, and try out his latest idea, as if to shun the vulgar instrumentality of Father’s telephone cord and the Dresden connection.
The Professor tried sulphate of quinine, oil of turpentine, rest, exercise, hot baths, cold baths, colored glasses, and electric sparks. He placed three magnets on the animal’s polar areas, put his front feet into a bucket full of hydrogen sulfide, and after bending Wolf into a backward arc, tipped him backward and forward to get his inner fluids moving. He donned a lilac surgeon’s smock and waved an iron wand over him. But all this produced only an occasional bemused twitch.
Floundering from failure to failure, he tried injecting vitamins directly into the vein, massaging the carotid artery and skull plates with homeopathic tinctures, and putting on a pair of galvanic socks that combined electricity and reflexology, but the only result was that Wolf suffered abdominal disorders which eventually affected the entire kennel.
One day he even hooked up a water hose to a special brass nozzle he had brought from the sanitarium, and directed the pressured stream upon Wolf ’s chest, which at first the dog reacted to with amusement, but then flew into a rage at and screamed like a jungle animal, pushing first his nose, then a front leg through the mesh of the kennel, severely damaging the ligaments and tearing out two claws at the root.
As Father bandaged the paw, he said, “The ‘stand aside’ is the most elemental maneuver, my friend. You really ought to try it once.”
And as it became clear that his experiments did not shock but only bemused my father, the Professor seemed to lose his enthusiasm. More charitably, it might be said he was distracted by the everyday life of the farm. Equally at home in the world of the microscopic—the nerve life of eels’ testicles—as in the largest abstractions in the history of suffering, the Professor seemed taken aback by every barnyard animal, astonished that a chicken might walk where it pleased, and dumbfounded that a woman might garrote one and boil it as she pleased. The life of the barnyard, he remarked, was so much richer than that of the Therapeian woods, which to hear him tell it was made up of nothing but large, dying trees, on one side of which were kissing couples, and on the other, a tight-lipped voyeur brandishing a forked twig.
Father, of course, detested both the microscope and telescope, as well as the X-ray and the mirror, and most of all photography. He hated anything which disconnected an image from its source, as befitted a master of the middle distance and a strong believer in the leash. Nothing amused him more than the faith which intellectuals placed in representation, especially as he watched the Professor wander among ducks and geese without the slightest naturalistic interest, pausing only to inspect the funnel with which Ainoha force-fed them warmed gruel. The Professor ran his palm across the phalanges and grease nipples of Father’s American steam tractor, which squatted, purred, and farted like any other farm animal. And when shown a bitch in the throes of producing a litter, the Professor praised her obliviousness to pain as she snapped the umbilical cords with her jaws and licked each pup clean of its gelatinous membrane, all while keeping one eye upon her observers and emitting, between chomps and caresses, a suitably polite growl. When the Professor mentioned that he too had come into this world with a caul, Father replied drily that all pups, even the runt, had such a fibroid helmet, and that it premonited nothing more than it protected, because at the very moment those cute little mugs were entering the world, the fetal brain, recognizing itself in the boring lap of domestic luxury, kills half its cells.
And who could forget the day when the Professor ran into the house red-faced and crying, “Wolf is ill, Wolf is finished!”? Felix ran to the kennel and was shown a stuprated blood-red stool, which turned out to be only a rotten plum. It was then he realized he was in the presence of a physician who had never witnessed a birth or a death.
Agreeing that the animal was being bombarded with suggestions from too many quarters, the Professor finally resorted to the French staring cure. Lying on his stomach and removing his spectacles, he looked deep into the animal’s yellowish eyes, deep into the history which baffles history, and with his pocket watch pendulating, applied such Odic force as he could muster. Wolf ’s nose followed the arc of the watch, but his eyes remained fixed without expression upon those of his interlocutor, sliding back and forth in their eyesockets like shot ball bearings. The tremors in his hindlegs gradually ceased. Father watched intently over his shoulder, resting upon one knee as a sergeant might observe a recruit on the firing range.
“Now we’re on to something,” he muttered.
“Yes, he seems to be responding,” the Professor wheezed.
“What I mean to say is, I never saw a dog you couldn’t stare down. Something is quite wrong with this one. It isn’t that he doesn’t know his place. It’s as if he has no place . . . and is quite comfortable there.”
“Shhhhhh.”
Man and animal lay locked in each other’s soft glare for at least twenty minutes, both their bodies absolutely still. Then the Professor saw something which frightened him, for across the spheroid of the eyeball he could make out a shallow groove, a primitive streak, a milky band in which less than golden sunbursts spangled, and he realized he was looking into nothing like a soul or a mind but the inverted cosmos of hysteria. He was examining Absolute Time, which did not emit light and could not be mapped. An angina-like pain spread from his heart to the furthest extremities of his body.
The Professor looked up and removed the watch, which now lay on the gravel between himself and the dog. Wolf was calm, dispassionate, his brow uncharacteristically clear. Indeed, Felix thought he had never seen an expression so positively opaque in an animal, except perhaps a snake.
“Sleep,” the Professor muttered, “sleep now, good Wolf.” He was determined to awaken in the animal the deepest part of his heritage, that dangerous and paramount personality to whom only a passive attitude is possible. But Wolf did not sleep and did not rest. His eyelids had not dropped a single millimeter.
“This eyeball business,” Father whispered, “I know it’s in great vogue and threatens to take over everything, but it is quite short in its effect. Looking, after all, is our weakest sense. Please, Herr Doktor!”
But there was no response. Felix reached down to find his recumbent co-trustee asleep, while Wolf ’s bright and now perfectly unslanted eyes, corneas boiling like a drunk’s, beamed a ray upon his master’s closed lids. After dusting off his suit, Felix took the Professor’s arm and walked him briskly around the hydrangeas.
“I believe we should admit, my dear friend, that there is no authoritative command for such a state. We have reached the bottom of this turgid well. Wolf is complying in his way, don’t you see? But there is nothing for it. In this subject as in so many, depth is an illusion, just as much as surface. It is too much an offense to your medical dignity to enter his logic, and he knows it.”
“I will admit,” the Professor sighed, limping slightly, “that one’s pride is involved. But it’s more than pride of ownership, you must admit.”
“On the contrary, I revere your pride, as ever. Do you think I would waste my time with some ordinary physician? Believe me, people much less intelligent than yourself have survived this. Still, you cannot understand this animal if you insist on translating him into concepts. And the eyeball business—well, it has its entertaining side, no doubt, but what I suspect is this: what if the hypnotic state is the norm not only for Wolf but for all of us? The norm is infinite suggestibility, neither sleep nor rest but a kind of somnambulism with all the nerves firing without stimuli. Every animal will fight if you disturb his disturbed state, because it’s the only equilibrium he knows. No, we must somehow jerk him out of this idiot séance, not reinforce the trance!” And on saying this he took out the Dresden silver collar and pressed it into his comrade’s palm.
“Talk will not reverse these conditions. You have to tell
this
story with your hands. Take it. Close the loop, pull the chain, hear the click.”
The Professor obediently slipped the Dresden links into his fob pocket, next to his watch.
“His defenses are extraordinarily strong,” he whispered between gritted teeth, perspiration cascading in rivulets from his brow and dripping from his nose as if from a stalactite.
“Ah, yes. Defenselessness is the most powerful weapon. The old ‘I won’t live without your love’ defense.”
“There must be a way to reach him, to teach . . .”
“Yes, indeed, but a good teacher teaches in a way you don’t call teaching. You must be on the alert to hear something you didn’t expect. If you’re only teaching, the orchestra sounds bad. If you tell them, ‘This is how it goes,’ you’re lost. Be honest, my good fellow. Have you ever learned anything from something which was told to you directly?”
While Felix now suspected that Wolf ’s static fits were of vascular origin, he suggested that the propensity for hauling was not really a way of taking advantage of his master, but instead was enforced by the Professor’s presuppositions, which were transmitted to the dog through the rope.
The Professor’s mouth dropped open. “You mean a kind of telepathy?”
“Telegraphy would be more like it,” Father said. “You needn’t mystify it. All we’re trying to do is to get Wolf to pick up the telephone. We don’t care yet about the response. It’s not that you are sending the wrong ideas. It’s that you are sending ideas at all. Do you bounce ideas off a child or a lover? Would you philosophize to your nude grandparent? No, it’s always something more or less than an idea one is sending out. You must learn to adopt a joyous, even childish tone, without the slightest hint of parody. This is a state which precludes—listen carefully, comrade—
any
ironic interpretation.”
The Professor nodded forlornly and returned with determination to the kennel. The staring cure in abeyance, he substituted long, animated conversations, conversing for both of them, as it were, with his full, round face pressed against the fence, speaking through the grill into Wolf ’s half-cocked ear, though the dog never seemed as interested as he had with the more musical Astingi nonsense. Indeed, Wolf listened piously but remained unapproachable. Occasionally he would lift his damaged paw and allow it to flutter across his chest. The Professor interpreted this gesture as a kind of lie. Things were reaching a head. He finally had to admit that he wanted to beat the animal.
“It’s quite understandable,” Felix said. “Remember, however, that the maimed tend to revenge themselves. It’s the police in him.”
“What is so frustrating,” the Professor said, “is that he is so accessible to observation, yet he only seems known to me through the stories you tell. It’s like some kind of strange picture book which looks natural but feels staged.”
