In Partial Disgrace (33 page)

We passed through a toll gate at the military border. Constructed in a bad imitation of the wells, its crotch sank lower in the ground, and the lever forming the gate was fir, three times the length of the well standard, with a cargo net full of cannonballs for the counterweight. The fir was squared off and thinned with an ax down to the tip, where the rope, connected by a chain apparatus, fell not to water but to a cogwheel to haul the gate down. It took great strength to crank a gate, which is why they invariably remained open at forty-five degrees perpendicular, an angle high enough that the tallest hayrick might pass beneath. Once beneath a gate, hat in hand, passport in the other, the primitive leverage of the wells seemed benign, big check marks in the sky, as if you had accounted for all the inventory before you left and could now do business without anxiety.

Of course, there were times when distant artillery shook the already tremulous ground in these fields of nothingness. The well levers in the Marches would seem to rise on their own, the locust sprouts shocked into bloom, and the toll gates would be cranked down, at which point no amount of love or money could open them. There existed no document lucid or authoritative enough to get you through that station, but when finally released, the two-ton gate would spring up like some child’s toy.

The two armies manning the borders had similar uniforms; only the colors of the epaulets and the weave of their braid differed, and both had a defeated look—puzzled faces and broad, unreferenced gestures, many of them maimed and on crutches, sitting around waiting to be demobbed or disembarked to another front. Occasionally they would form up and fan out in a long column, two abreast, simulating a withdrawal or reconnaissance around an empty field. And semi-occasionally a file of these hangdog men in full battle gear, packs sagging at the small of their backs, rifles slung butt-up over a rounded shoulder, would appear like phantoms out of the fog, but they would never look you in the eye, much less threaten. Another day you might find them all on one knee, service caps crumpled in one fist, at Mass. But their most common and dignified maneuver, it appeared, was squatting on their field latrines, half a dozen at a time, those waiting in line knocking pipes out on their rifle butts, bayonets stuck in the ground, staring out over an embankment or a half-filled trench, writing letters on each other’s backs.

On anniversaries of major battles the two adversaries would have a soccer match among the wells, or a boxing competition on a tarpaulin stretched from stump to stump in a patch of woods. But more often than not they would simply lounge around the benches by the gatehouse, holding hands sometimes, lagging the coins of the realm, which depreciated before they even hit the ground. Theoretically, they were locked in primordial and eternal combat, but in fact both were armies in full desultory retreat from politics, ideology, and nationalism, from the cant of every discipline, comical but serene.

Any time I felt, as one increasingly did in those years, that the impersonal forces of history were grabbing hold as the hum of the social machinery started to miss, every time I felt such an anxiety, I would ride out to watch those aimless soldiers guarding the unmarked foggy border, pants crumpled around their boots as they eternally sat on their latrines, and be touched by the moments of tender feelings of men lost in the last outpost—soldiers who in the end had become skeptical of every plan and were protected by nothing but the commonplace delicacy of their own displaced credulity, pondering how to refuse the abstract mission which had befallen them without being traitors. And while I come from a long line of noncombatants, never put a stick to my shoulder as a child, never learned with my tongue how to make the sound of a gun, I loved those crumpled, fragile, degarraloused soldiers as much as a man could love another human being. Parades never did a thing for me, and serried ranks assembled brings up in my gorge only the great graph of Napoleon’s four hundred thousand setting out from the Marchlands to Russia, and returning in the cold with less than ten thousand men, marching without fear and hope.

Those guard-stations at the gates were more full of life than any art I ever saw, more beautiful than ballerinas. Common soldiers no longer brave, no longer lads, not prideful yet gay, covered with scabs and lice, pay in arrears, their only amusement half-decks of cards and half-finished letters, soldiers who, silently and collectively, provided the greatest moral example by simply refusing to be killed.

The green steeples of Sare had come into view. We trotted though the empty cobbled streets in the moonlight, and I left my charge at the train station, also deserted save for the little green locomotive, which was being washed.

If any of this made any impression on the Professor, he did not say. It was two in the morning when I entered the lime-tree avenue of Semper Vero, the horses trotting on their own accord. Everything on that transparent day had given me pleasure. A thunderstorm was coming up, and as the first rainbursts crackled down, the horses’ withers glittered like a dung beetle’s back. Once in the stable, they swiped at the fragrant hay, then playfully brushed each other’s faces, batting their silken lashes and pawing at the stable floor. Saddle and bridle removed, they exhaled and flung themselves onto a small haystack. Kicking out all four legs and running like dogs in their sleep, they petulantly destroyed the fodder racks, knowing that this night’s grooming would be up to them, groaning in their stalls.

As I entered the hallway I could hear someone playing scales, as was often the case in our house, any time of day or night, but these were exercises of stunning rapidity and monotony. From the top stair I could make out Gubik’s back working robotically on the Bösendorfer, preparing for his audition no doubt. But then I noticed a fat book with scarlet bindings open on the music stand, which he was reading while playing, repeating the scales over and over, as if he were only pretending to practice.

TOPSY AND THE PRINCESS

(Iulus)

An enormous black-lacquered Panhard-Levassor limousine, whose exaggerated aerodynamics, as with so many French designs (which ape the birdlike only to end up reptilian), was the first automobile ever to arrive at Semper Vero, its bonnet still throbbing even when the engine was turned off. I was astonished to see Öscar Ögur at his footman’s post, only moderately drunk, and for the first time in memory in full uniform: gray-green jacket with horn buttons, gray riding breeches with scarlet revers, and knee-high polished boots. The car was quickly surrounded by a few shaggy fieldhands and slender, wistful goosegirls. Mother, attuned only to the echoes of quadrupeds, had for once not anticipated this arrival; indeed, she was still abed as I ran to rouse Father from his lair. Only when he emerged, gruff and disoriented, did Öscar open the car door, and there Felix recognized the still beautiful if melancholy face of Princess Zanäia, dressed in a simple muslin dress with a single string of pearls and rubies. And behind her, the stolid chocolate gaze and arch benevolence of the Professor.

That very night the Voo returned, or rather his dog did, a final inane augury demanding divination. Azure flecked his mottled back, dappled golden light set his scales ablaze, and in his heads, left and right, his jaws were clamped about the whitest of femurs, while in his middle muzzle, his lips were pursed ovulate, as if around a vowel. He stood there a long time, straining as if to defecate, offering me the bribe of sleep. But omens no longer impressed me, for what good is foretelling if you cannot prevent the disasters you foresee?

“It must be a quarter of a century since I’ve visited your . . .
parc
,” the Princess announced wistfully. “A wonderful place to discover that childhood is not all asexual,
non? Hélas
!” She turned slightly to the Professor, holding a hand to her breast. “I cannot keep my eyes fixed on any single face or feeling. The immobility of the eyes is forbidden to those who survive.” And then she moved serenely, save for her darting glances at each footfall, up the staircase to greet Ainoha, who had just emerged in a hooded capuchin robe to mask her disheveled hair and sleep-filled eyes.

In the car Felix could make out a dog with its face squashed horribly against the windscreen. The rear compartment of the Panhard, with its needlepointed empire jump seats, held a number of crystal decanters, several small portraits, an herbarium full of fern specimens, and great wads of manuscript.

“And we’ve brought you some sardines,” the Professor winked, as if this were a gift to the fishiest tapestry on earth.

Father’s first reflex was to move toward the injured animal trapped in the limousine, but sensing his concern, the dog bounced at once through the rolled-down window, exhibiting that it was not maimed at all, but merely an extremely brachiocephalic specimen of a golden chow, its undershot jaw smashed back in its skull like old green potatoes.

“
Now
what
petit toxemia
have you brought me?” Father chuckled beneath his breath.

“You see before you Sophroniska Vom Pouilly-Gepackt,” the Professor said proudly. “The Prinzessin calls her ‘Topsy.’” Topsy staggered with self-importance out to the oval lawn, and before she knew it Father had slipped the Dresden links upon her.

“An interesting specimen,” he murmured. “Full of nothingness, yet oblivious to it.” Then his eyes flared on the animal as if to calm her, as one sets a fire line to contain a larger one. “Put on this bow, my little bitch,” he said to her. And then, linked by the telephone cord, they walked about the grassy circle, entering for a moment the netherworld of direct apprehension.

“The fair sex, as with asteroids, are either coming toward you or going away from you. That is the first thing we must determine,” Felix intoned, “though with
royalty
,” he grinned, “we can measure where they have been, if not where they are going.”

“She appears
supernormalian
to me,” the Professor beamed, though Topsy had begun to stray impertinently as the Dresden circlets imperceptibly swallowed one another, an aimless sluttish gambol, the chief aim of which was apparently to advertise that her every sense was as good as dead, a fact to which Father at first gave a little slack of compassion. Topsy had brought all the self-indulgence of the future Age of Solipsism into Semper Vero with her scraggly arse.

“We have a saying in Cannonia, Professor. ‘From a dog, you will never get bacon.’” Then Felix walked on, relaxed and erect, whistling a little Turkish march, mimicking Topsy’s minimal alertness like a flaneur in a strange city for the first time who pretends he is lost to see what random reaction that might precipitate. This calculated air of absence caught her attention. He cut a scallop from the circle on the next pass, just a fraction, taking the rind off their route and making it ovoid, the telephone cord gradually straightening, until it was taut as the horizon. And then, with the greatest delicacy, he gave neither a
pop
, a
snap
, a tug, nor a yank, but something at once more forceful and precise—a pulse before the beat—which drew the collar ringlets taut just above the larynx. This caused Topsy to catch her teenage breath, and thus inverting her sense of smell, focused her brain upon her sphincter, and, like sensing a burnt cake taken out of the oven in the next town, take in the faintest whiff of the invariance of life.

Of course, she lunged. But the impersonal mechanism did its job, the simple line of force instructing Topsy that it was
she
who was injuring herself. Then Father spoke.

“Topsy,” he said, as if she were the most important person in the world, “so
schtupid
!” And their eyes, blue above and bronze below, met for a moment in a single violet transplant.

Another lunge. This time determined and powerful, as a man walks more deliberately when his hands are tied behind his back, but the line of legitimization, the opposite of breathing, again enforced itself.

“Soooooooooo
schtoopid
!” Topsy’s eyes bulged at the judgment, the first virginal sign of focusing, after surviving a few footfalls of fear. And then they walked on together in a little collective shudder, not interested in diminishing the circle any longer, but only in maintaining a proper distance, Topsy watching Father’s mouth out of the corner of her eye. Then it happened. She took a single cautious step, not without spring, and perhaps for the first time ever—like a man who has done his first backflip and then never forgets how—it was evident she was paying attention to where she was going, not just following her nose.

“So
schmart
,” Felix said softly. “
Sie
schmart,
Topsy!”

They took a few more somewhat grandiose turns, feelings without names pulsating along the cord, then Father stopped short without taking up the slack, and Topsy copied
him
. He reached down, and patted her head.

“
Schmart
Topsy,” he said, and then removed the collar. “Nunc scio quid sit amor” (“Now we know what love is”), he muttered to himself.

The Professor stared incredulously. “So schtupid? So schmart? That’s the whole of it?”

“All for now,” Father said cheerfully. “Never work a tired dog.” Topsy rolled on her back in the grass, arching her spine, as if to rub away the stain of the experience. “Lest the neurotica become psychopathia.”

“And what do we call this . . . methodology?” the Professor sniggered.

“Ah, Professor, try to be serious for a moment. The only true method is this: you try to hear all the notes before you hum the tune.”

The Princess had been watching this demonstration attentively through her lorgnette like a drowned man. “She’s just like me,” she murmured sadly. “A little barbarous, but only on the inside. It won’t come out.” Topsy had begun to walk backward like a snail trying to fit itself back into its lost shell.

“She seems to have no particular problem,” Mother said brightly, wiping something from her eye. “She is beautifully shaped, with perfect little feet, and her nostrils are expanded more than I ever saw in any dog, I think.”

The Princess smiled mysteriously. “Her only problem is . . . abdominal.”

“If I may say,” Father interjected without a trace of irony. “The fair sex, though possessing unbounded and most
proper
influence over
us
, have but little control over their canine favorites. This is because when they take the poor soul for a walk, they constantly call to it, lest it should go astray. Ere long, the dog pays not the slightest attention. There is also a varying in the tone of voice which generally prevents teaching anything beyond the art of begging. ‘Beg, beg, beg, sir. Beg!’ Am I not correct? And sitting in a begging attitude is not an agreeable position for a dog. One might quite as easily teach her to dance, hold a pipe in her mouth, shut the door, pull a bellrope, leap over a parasol, or drag forth a napkin and spread it as a tablecloth. What would you have, Princess?”

The Princess had once made a show of good will and benevolence to those who, being different from herself, could not imagine her true interests and tastes. But she now made little effort to explain herself, knowing that in most cases this would be futile.

“Your husband, my dear,” she turned to Mother, “seems a man very much in contact with his
uck
.”

Ainoha reacted as if she had been struck by a bullet, and quickly braced herself by grasping the Princess’s forearm, which caused her in turn to blanche. The very mention of that word, and the merest chance that it would set off the causeries of abstract chat of the last visit, threw a fear into her she had not experienced since seeing a dog run over in the road, and watching it scream with pain as it dragged its broken hindquarters off into the woods. She resolved to lock the door forever on this lumber room of discourse.

“Do you enjoy diving, Prinzessin?” she blurted out.

“I beg your pardon!”

“Diving. You know, into water.” Her voice trilled back in her throat.

“Well, not since I was a child,” the Princess murmured. Her sadness had, if anything, deepened.

“Then it’s settled. We must recast the days of your youth here. I’ll take care of everything. Then we’ll go shoot some arrows.” And as she rushed her guest into the house, the men doffed their hats, and even Topsy herself seemed somewhat relieved.

“Another didact, I see,” Father said under his breath.

“Her virility and station have caused her a great deal of suffering,” the Professor said evenly. “She deserves your every consolation.”

“There are, no doubt, griefs and distresses no physician can measure. As for little Topsy, who can say? She is either a little too absent or a little too present, and always a little off center. Beauty with nothing else is worse than shit. You can mix all the raisins you want with turds, but they’re still turds. But who knows, we may see a bit of progress yet.”

“We are in need of a success,” the Professor intoned. “This woman, who can have anything she wants, is desperately alone.”

“In my experience, friend, privileges are more difficult to overcome than abuses. I trust you have arranged for the fee.
Avanti
!” And with a wave of his hand, Father gestured across the river. “We will work the high ground first, to see how she behaves when she knows her mistress is not watching after her. We must take care to never use any words she is likely to hear from others. And please remember, Professor, hallooing spoils the sport.”

Then he strode off, singing an old Venetian ditty:

The ladies disrobed quickly, like schoolgirls, in the great hall of gray vibrating radiators. As the suits remained wet, they decided to swim in their chemises, and as they galloped down the path to the bathing beach, they could make out Father and the Professor traversing the shallows upstream, with a recalcitrant but unleashed Topsy following them by leaping from one slick stone to another.

“Have no fear of the diving board,” Mother announced over her shoulder. “It was left over from the piano lumber, good Cannonian pine used to line the trenches in the Balkan Wars, blasted with shrapnel and blood, and therefore incapable of splitting or further mischief.” This was something of an exaggeration, but our board was huge indeed, jutting fourteen feet out into a lagoon entirely concealed by reeds and anchored with a clutch of welded cannon balls. Ainoha sprung immediately to the end of the board, and without hesitation accomplished her patented half-gainer, disappearing into the Mze without so much as a fleck of foam. When she resurfaced and shook her golden mane, she saw the Princess follow her with only slight trepidation, though she held both her nose and mouth when she jumped, producing a fine geyser. They floated on their backs spitting modestly and scrunching their toes. Then, on a shawl, upon the weedy beach, as their crinolines conformed to their wet bodies, they regarded themselves intently as they turbaned their wet locks.

“My husband,” the Princess offered as an icebreaker, “is a disgusting fellow.”

The swimming hole marked the edge of the first Stone Age settlement in 6000
BC
. At that time a riverine ledge extended completely across the Mze, a natural ford and the future site of a Roman bridge. But the attraction here for the mentality of mankind’s first predatory age was not the crossing so much as the whirlpools just beneath the ledge, which churned up vast amounts of nutrients and attracted carp, tench, loach, pike-perch, and sturgeon. The votaries discovered in this settlement’s burial pits were human heads with fish lips, as well as cave paintings depicting trained dogs diving into the tawny river to retrieve live fish, as they believed the whirlpools to be bottomless. The river and their dogs gave them everything. There was no need to bait a hook, cast a net, or sharpen a spear. The Mze washed away every little miserable existence, and its banks provided water chestnuts, sloes, field pears, rose hips, cornel cherries, wild plum, and crab apple. Yet the site was soon abandoned, and it was this ledge, now exposed at low water for the first time in anyone’s memory, that Topsy and her pedagogical duo traversed until they came to the Roman central arch, where the remainder of the ledge had been blasted away in the early nineteenth century for massed boat traffic. From the broken arch, a slatted rope bridge enjoined the far cliffs, and Father carried Topsy this final third.