Wide World In Celebration and Sorrow

by Leon Rooke

  Maybe I nodded off, he thought. Maybe I was unconscious there for a minute.

  His body felt kind of numb, especially in the rear quarters.

  He still did not yet take his situation seriously.

  The gnats were going on about their business. Thousands of them lazily circling just above him. What were they doing? What exactly was their business? Were gnats merely decorative? Did they have any function at all on this earth?

  Enough of this, Lap finally said. Time to get going.

  He found he couldn’t. He stared in disbelief at his legs, which refused to obey their summons. Neither would lift the smallest token. How extraordinary. Can you believe it?

  Come on now, he said. Don’t be silly.

  He tried again. Better. Yes, better. This was more like the Lap of old. He was up on his front paws, knees buckling some but otherwise holding steady. The back legs were taking their time about it. They didn’t appear to like at all what they were being asked to do. They seemed to want him to drag them along. All right. He could do that. You want dragging, I’ll drag.

  To his surprise, the instant he made to do so an agonizing bolt struck his brain; uncontrollable spasms shook his body; he splashed back down in the creek. He was underwater, his eyes open in disbelief, dimly perceiving schools of little fish reassembling – minnows, tadpoles? – to drift scant inches from his nose. Beg your pardon, they were saying. Do you live here? Do you mean to eat us?

  For a while after that all was dreamy. I am asleep, was Lap’s thought. Asleep and dreaming. A good lovely dream. He and his hawk, a hawk of gigantic size, were in heroic battle. The hawk squawking and cutting, slashing, giving it his ut-most. Over the years Lap had had a hundred battles with this very creature, and always it returned for more. But when could a mere hawk defeat a mighty dog? Not in your lifetime, hawk, he told the bird. Even as he spoke the dream was turned sour; it was becoming another dog’s dream. He was upside down in a black sky, the ankles of his hind legs caught in the beast’s talons.

  The hawk was saying, “Thought you’d play dead, would you?”

  That couldn’t be. The voice was not at all that of his old hawk friend. Lap opened his eyes. He groaned. He shook with fear. The man he knew of as Ome, Homer, had hold of his limbs and was dragging him through slush and sludge, over rocks, up a mossy bank.

  Now Ome was crouched over him. Running a hand up and down Lap’s body. Laughing:

  “I knew it,” Ome said. “Both slugs got you, didn’t they, dog? My, my. I’m satisfied. Now I think you can die.”

  Something crashed into Lap’s head. He felt the man’s boots slamming into him. Then he was flying through air into the creek. He was sinking deeper and deeper into cold black water.

  Night passed and much of the next day. He awakened to find himself back in the creek the dream had taken him from. He was cold and hungry, more than a little benumbed in his hind quarters. He tried standing, laughing at the shivers in his hind legs. You dumb dog, he thought. He laughed harder, and fell over. Into the drink again. He lay moaning awhile. Soon, he became aware of a pussy liquid dripping at the corners of his eyes and that sting again. In his ear. Yes, in his ear. Hunger, though, was his deeper problem. He was glad about that. Hunger was normal. Divine providence was master over fate. Not that this mattered. Both had long ago decreed that the whole of his days should be marked, one, by thirst, and two, by hunger.

  On the third day after Lap’s captivity by the creek, he might have been seen stealthily poking his head through the dense edge of a clearing. Here was familiar territory, here was home. The sight that greeted him was a heartening one. Too bad the day was overcast, or his spirit might truly have lifted. He wondered why he was being so wary in his approach to the house. Had she returned yet? Were the children here? Where and why were they gone?

  He first peeked into his own slatboard yardhouse. No one had been in grooming it, he saw. His blanket was there. It smelled of him. Well, it smelled of the old him. His water dish and food bowl were supposed to have been by the entrance; they were not there. After a time, he found them, or pieces of them, spread about in a weedy field. So. Well, one could not expect matters to remain the same forever. No one, not even the children or the woman, had offered any guarantees.

  He was keeping a wary eye on the back door. He was trying not to moan. It was taking a valiant effort to refrain from barking. His ear hurt. He was cold and hungry. This was not one of his better days.

  For a while, from beneath the car, he watched the lit window. The kitchen. There was food in there. He knew exactly where it was, too.

  He must have dozed. Some hours later, head resting on his front paws, he was seized by panic. Shouts. Racing feet.

  “You son of a bitch,” the man was shouting. The rifle cocked.

  Wassup?

  Lap ducked down, and just in time because he heard the bullet ping into the automobile exactly where that same ear might have been.

  Now the man was again running. Gone completely crazy. Well, whenever wasn’t he? Lap slithered backwards beneath the car and out the far side. He heard other bullets thracking.

  Lap took off. Around the house, around a tree, slithering under bushy limbs, up the back steps, down the back steps, around the house again, beneath the house, under the porch, scrambling. Dust in his nose, his hide catching on nails, his head bumping cross beams, crawling, dodging. The man huffing after him.

  Afterwards, he listened to the man’s footsteps on the floorboards overhead, the man cursing, smelled the man frying up an egg on the stove, throwing dishes into the sink, talking on the phone. Walking, walking. Walking those boards.

  On the phone saying, “I don’t want them back. They come back, it will be the last thing they do.”

  At last the frenzy subsiding. Peace at last.

  Everything so silent up there. Lap thinking, what’s he doing, is he asleep, can I come out now?

  Is it safe? Is the war over?

  Lap listening, losing his concentration as he licks a paw, wipes pus from an eye, then some little scratch of sound and those ears springing up again.

  He’s up to something, the dog thinking.

  It was like this before he locked those kids in the cupboard. Nailed them up in there. No food, no water, they stay in there till I say different.

  Hours go by. Well, who’s to know how long, does a dog know? Yes, hours and hours, as Lap would say: a fucking lifetime.

  And at last the man’s footsteps are detected crossing the kitchen floor, he’s chuckling to himself, he’s saying, “Now, you son of a bitch, let’s see how you like this.” He’s crossing the screened-in back porch, he’s coming down those back steps. Ever so softly, listen to that sweet voice.

  He’s placing a white plate on the grass. Meat! Lap can smell it.

  Whoa! Outta sight!

  “Come on, Lap. Come on, boy. Come on now, come and get it.”

  His voice ever so gentle. Like honey, that voice.

  The man waiting, waiting.

  Saying, “Come and get it, old boy. What say, Lap. Lap it up, old boy.”

  Lap scrunched down in a nearby hole, staring at the man’s muddy boots, his legs. At that plate.

  Looking into his eyes as the man crouches down, peers for him beneath the house.

  “No hurry. I know you’re under there.”

  Lap drooling. Dying to jump at that plate.

  And finally the man returning inside the house, singing himself a little song. Happy as can be, the mean son of a bitch.

  Lap sniffs the meat. He circles the plate. He drops down beside it, his nose pressing one chunk after another. Drooling. His tongue lapping. But not lapping that meat. It looks delicious. It smells divine. His jaws tingle, his tail swings, just to see it there.

  But the meat stays where it is. It will stay there for hours, until dusk, when a coon mother and her coon children arrive, eat it, and die. Lap already is long gone. He is on the road. He knows these roads. These roads, not a single field,
no ravine or quarry or wooded area will long fool him. He’s hungry, sore, has a stinging ear, a headache, pus in his eyes, but he knows the way. He’ll find a way. Those children, that woman, they need him. They’ve gone to Grandpaps. It may take a month, a year. A lifetime. He’ll get there.

  “There goes someone’s dog,” people will say.

  There he goes.

  SIDEBAR TO THE JUDICIARY PROCEEDINGS, THE NÜRNBERG WAR TRIALS, NOVEMBER 1945

  [The Speaker, in black judicial robes, reclines in an easy chair, occasionally sipping from a cognac glass. Behind him can be seen the flags of the victorious nations. Lights throw shadows from the cutout figures who comprise his audience.]

  The craniologist who came to measure Heidegger’s brain was made to stand in the rain by the front step while Elfride went to ask the famous philosopher would he be willing.

  Heidegger was in his study, surrounded by a heap of open books. He told Elfride not to be absurd. He was not to be disturbed.

  Elfride told her husband that the craniologist had said the task would only take a minute. At this Heidegger laughed a scornful laugh. “We shall see about that,” he said. Elfride had to jump aside, so quickly did he exit the room.

  The craniologist, no fool, had found partial protection from the rain under the roof’s overhang. Heidegger, striding fast, was outside in the rain himself before he knew it – whipping his head about in search of the visitor.

  He did not see the craniologist until the man spoke.

  “Over here.”

  Already they were both drenched.

  What the craniologist saw was a short, thick-waisted man with a heavy face, a large, squarish brow, jet black hair, and an untended moustache patterned after the Führer’s.

  The philosopher saw a stringbean mortician, astoundingly advanced in years, possessing an overlarge head.

  Elfride had taken up a stance in the doorway, which Heidegger, as often was the case, had left open. The great man could not be bothered with closing doors.

  She looked at the two of them standing under the overhang, and at the rain splattering their shoes and the cuffs of their pants, and did not say to them what it occurred to her to say ­– that even dogs knew enough to come in out of the rain.

  The craniologist was explaining his intentions.

  Heidegger took the visitor to be a man of bureaucratic dullness, inflated with a sense of his own importance. This made the philosopher impatient and rude.

  As for the craniologist, Goebbels’ office had told him the Magus likely would be difficult – aloof, brusque, opinionated – and that he should persevere and endeavour not to offend, as Heidegger was under consideration for an exalted position within the Party.

  He had not expected a man of such small stature.

  Elfride remained in the doorway, biting at a hangnail, but with an air that suggested she thought herself every bit as important as them.

  “If you want anything,” she said, “you will let me know. But I am not bringing my good china out here in the rain.”

  The craniologist stood up straighter. He told her that he had not come here to eat.

  Heidegger told Elfride to stop bothering them with her trivialities.

  After showing both of them – by a look that flooded her face – how horrified their comments made her feel, Elfride disappeared behind the slammed door.

  “Women,” the craniologist said, “have small brains.”

  Heidegger did not leap to his wife’s defence. He was thinking that the craniologist had by far the privileged spot under the roof’s overhang. Hardly any rain was falling on him. He was thinking that their shoes were wet and dirty and now Elfride was unlikely to allow either of them inside unless they entered in stocking feet. He could not abide the thought of having a stocking-footed craniologist walking over his polished floors and sitting in his chairs.

  It began raining harder.

  “Eva, I’ve heard,” said Heidegger, “has intelligence.”

  Heidegger intended this statement as a test of the craniologist’s own intelligence. He was not going to waste his time out here in the rain talking to an idiot.

  Eva Who? Which Eva? Those were his two questions, and the stuffy craniologist would either know the answer or not know the answer.

  But the craniologist was not aswim in the dark.

  “Eva has brains,” the man said. “I stand corrected.”

  Heidegger scrutinized the craniologist’s features more closely. I stand corrected were not words he could ever imagine himself uttering, any more than he could imagine the Führer uttering them; it proved that the craniologist, however much he wore the mask of public esteem, perceived in his heart that he was very much an underling.

  “Eva Braun and the Führer are properly suited to each other,” the craniologist said.

  Heidegger had the impression the man was suggesting he had dinner with the Führer and his darling every evening.

  “Move a little,” Heidegger said, elbowing the man.

  But the craniologist did not move.

  Every now and then the wind was blowing the rain’s spray into their faces.

  The Heidegger house was set well away from the street. Under the thick hedgerow by the street a deformed cat, refused by the neighbourhood, was trying to find a dry spot. The soaked cat, to Heidegger’s eyes, had a slimy look. The cat had been tormenting him for months by hopping up on the outside still of his study and moaning at him.

  “The effect this rain is having on our soldiers at the front is God’s own misery,” Heidegger said.

  It had been raining in Freiburg and over all of Europe for a full three weeks. There were times when Heidegger felt he would never again see spring. He longed for his cabin in the Black Forest, at Todtnauberg.

  It was isolated there. At Todtnauberg he could don Swabian peasant dress, brew tea on the stove, and think.

  The craniologist had no comment to make on the war effort.

  The craniologist had with him a leather satchel in which he obviously transported the tools of his trade. He seemed concerned that the satchel was getting wet. A moment ago the satchel was between his legs; now he tried stuffing it beneath his coat, though the satchel was much too large.

  “How do you measure your brains?” Heidegger asked.

  The craniologist looked surprised. He looked as though he thought this was information which should be under everyone’s province.

  “Various means,” he said.

  Heidegger snorted; he hated the vague.

  “By eye, by feel, by—”

  The cat abandoned the hedge in a run. Midway across the grass, it stopped, then it scurried off in a new direction.

  Good, Heidegger thought. The cat had developed a limp.

  A week before, the cat had given birth to a single kitten.

  “A cloth tape,” the craniologist said, hardly opening his lips.

  “Cloth or wood or German steel,” said Heidegger, “you do not have measuring apparatus of sufficient girth to measure Heidegger’s brain.”

  The craniologist smirked.

  Heidegger told him: “The time that lapses between one Heidegger thought and another cannot be measured any more than the content of the thoughts themselves can.”

  It seemed to Heidegger that the craniologist sneered. Someone, he thought, should report this man.

  “I show you two spoons,” the philosopher said. “One filled with lead, the other with gold. In the dark you would say both weighed the same.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the craniologist said. “That is not true.”

  Heidegger’s mouth dropped open. Not since old Husserl, whom he reviled with all his heart, had anyone spoken so to him.

  Edmund Husserl, right here in Freiburg, had invented phenomenology; Heidegger, celebrated, had but scratched the bare bones of time and being.

  The rain was splattering up as high as their knees now. His shoes were sodden.

  The critique of words by yet more words, Heidegger thoug
ht. Before Heidegger that is all philosophy was.

  “When I sleep my brain swells enormously,” he said. “Elfride has noticed this. She has the visual proof not only of her own eyes but also in the wear and tear of my pillow.”

  The craniologist nodded. The statement did not seem to amaze him.

  “When I am teaching, or talking to certain people – Löwith, for instance, in the old days – I can feel my brain swelling large as a melon. If sat on a wall you would think me Humpty-Dumpty.”

  Elfride would have smiled at this joke; the craniologist didn’t.

  “The Heidegger brain is the potentate of the metaphysical,” Heidegger said. “How can you hope to measure the metaphysical, when Heidegger has himself grappled with it each instant of his life? Even if your cloth tapes could span the metaphysical the hand meant to hold those tapes could not hold the volume of tapes required. Your cloth tape could not even span so much as the Greeks who relentlessly toil inside Heidegger’s brain. How could you measure the one brain in the world which alone in the world charts the scope of time and being?”

  “I can,” the craniologist said.

  Heidegger laughed. He was unaccustomed to doing so. His laugh sounded like a snarl.

  The cat was meowing in the rain. Heidegger could not determine where it was meowing from. The cat was skin and bones. What kept it alive was a mystery.

  “You could set around me a ring of buckets and I could pour my strange syntax into those buckets but you could never bring enough buckets to hold even my syntactical leavings.”

  A tick had developed at one corner of the craniologist’s thin mouth.

  “Am I losing you?” Heidegger asked.

  A phrase hopped into Heidegger’s brain: from me and yet from beyond me. Later he would endeavour to sort out what this meant.

  The craniologist closed his eyes, as though in pain.

  In his research on Heidegger he had learned that the philosopher had spent the summer of 1918, twenty-nine years old, as a soldier in the Verdun district. He had hoisted and studied balloons. With data gleaned from these balloons weather forecasts had been made, necessary for the success of poison gas attacks.