In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  “Ah, yes,” he spoke for the first time, wrinkling his nose. “Most of Europe smells of seaweed.”

  “A seacoast can come in handy,” I bantered.

  “Oceanus is a nullity,” he sniffed. “If a sea should be required,” he added more mysteriously than nicely, “it can always be brought onstage in the actor’s eyes.”

  BEFORE THE THIRTY YEARS WAR

  (Iulus)

  I was born in Cannonia, province of Klavier, in 1924, the year that Lenin and Wilson died within ten days of each other. A member of the historical classes in the Central Empires, I came to life on my parents’ estate at Semper Vero, where tributaries of the living Mze and the dead Mze join arms in an artificial lake. The United States had not yet declared war upon us.

  Today the Eyelet of Cannonia exists on few maps of Europe, the country often being covered by the mandatory compass sign or coat-of-arms. A country which is effectively all border, it remains almost perfectly unknown, the smallest and densest hermit kingdom on earth, an unprincipled non-principality, a puppet state without strings, a protectorate with no friends. Always part of the unredeemed lands, that uninscribed space where Teuton and Slav have offered each other the hemlock since the beginning of time, Cannonia has been occupied by all the major and most of the minor European and Asian powers since a lost column of Philip of Macedon stumbled upon its southernmost village, turning it into a bloody abattoir and renaming it Kynosarges after its only surviving inhabitant, a fleeing dog. Philip’s son, Alexander, would rue the day that he did not follow up on the only battle of the Eastern Empire fought in Europe, and was tortured into alcoholism by the suspicion that he had been raping the wrong continent all along. At Kynosarges he threw up a shrine to Dionysus and garlanded the ruins with ivy, which some ancients believed to be the entrance to Hades.

  Our home, a cream-colored building in the shape of a thrown horseshoe, formerly a shooting box of the lesser nobility, was set on a plateau of red and silver heather and surrounded by an arboretum of rare evergreens. It had been in my family for one hundred years, during most of which it had been for sale. When my mother’s father inherited the property in the 1840s from a distant cousin, he ignored the architecture, eyes only for the land, which then held an undistinguished park. On trains, boats, and carts he brought in rare evergreens from all over the world, as if what they needed in this vast mountain periphery, filled then with virgin forest, was more trees. With its blue-black spruce, lime-green tsuga, feathery apricot of zelkova, and an occasional minaret of golden cypress, Semper Vero held the richest assortment of evergreens east of the Rhine. Grandfather also introduced animals from every corner—ostrich and rhino, auroch and ibex, llama and camel—many of which thrived, albeit in progressively miniaturized state, alongside the indigenous stag and hare. The park he then declared a game sanctuary, to which the people of Cannonia enjoyed unlimited access, except the King, who was enjoined from picking so much as a violet.

  From my room in the centermost of three squat turrets I overlooked the kennels, set out upon an island in the artificial lake, and beyond that the town of Silbürsmerze, surrounded by trapezoidal fields stiff with hard, red wheat. We lived sumptuously in the manner of the era, receiving all and sundry, feeding them to surfeit, giving away oats to each passing stranger, keeping musicians, buffoons, and singers, in addition to Catspaw, our resident artiste and intellectual gent, and of course our hounds.

  My father was attorney and village notary. His family had come to Cannonia as part of the great Huguenot migration, carrying with them nothing but a bust of Erasmus. Arriving after the latest wars of liberation had reduced every town to dust, the only inhabitants being a few Greeks and Jews, they found themselves more powerful in fact than in the law, unable to claim primacy or privilege, but triumphing over the lesser aristocracy by better management, making do on lesser sums, before they themselves were replaced by Schwabian, then Jewish bailiffs.

  Our life revolved around the kennels. My parents possessed a brace of animals called “Chetvorah” in the local dialect, dogs revered for centuries for their hunting ability. The yard of my childhood was littered with the limbs and stuffings of the training puppets Mother fashioned from patch quilts and sockheads, little limp punchinellos which the dogs carried about until they disintegrated. Father used a bamboo pole and fishline tied to a grouse feather to get them on point, while Mother accustomed them to the gun. She weaned each litter, taking them their pans of steaming chicken stew four times a day, and as soon as their noses were buried in the gruel, tails propellers, she would circle them while discharging a revolver behind her back. The bullets shattered the terrace wall, ricocheted among the limestone outbuildings, and scarred the ancient oaks. There were those who misinterpreted the lady of the house always with a pistol in her apron pocket, but it is inarguable that growing up is the incremental conquering of fear. Today, you could set off a cannon in my room and I would only nod.

  I do not know when my parents abandoned their common bedroom and moved into separate suites in the towers at each end of the house, though it seemed to coincide roughly with my appearance. From their respective suites they could see each other through me in the central tower, and at night I could see Mother’s candles glow in the smiling Orient, while to the West, Father’s greenish lampglass shone, an omen of the electrified cities to come.

  As for our recent troubles, the cause is clearer than usually imagined, for our grain market, which once fed all of Europe, had been flooded by cheap surpluses from America, dropping the price of wheat by half. The farmers of Klavierland, lacking cash, deferred Father’s bills until all his litigatory energy was spent on fruitless efforts to collect his own fees in the clogged civil courts. Bad debt became the driving force of our reverse renaissance, a spiral in which everyone borrowed more to pay the interest on the debts on which they had already defaulted, credit pyramided upon credit, and the only way to survive was to live in perpetual bad faith. As his business dried up, Father would look out at the rotting fields beyond our property muttering “American cereal,” an expletive arioso which came to explain every problem we encountered and still retains a certain resonance throughout the local cosmos. Soon came the layoffs, first of the part-time help, then of the marginal servants who could least afford it, the first-fired who would resurface as our masters a generation later. The gardens, never prim, grew even more ragged, leaving it hard to tell a flower from a vegetable or fruit. The grass in the uncut meadows ran wild, reaching even the armpits of those on horseback, and in which the herds of grazing aurochs were barely visible. The best woodlots were sold off, copses along the roads cut down to deprive thieves of hiding places, and the horses, of course, reduced. A generation of geese and ducks passed on, their organs confitured and packed away in cellars. Even the tanneries, now well-launched into the miracles of modern chemistry, stopped buying our dog shit for their dyes.

  Indeed, the last cash export from Semper Vero was the leeches found in abundance in the swamps, for apothecaries still thrived upon the margins of the Central Empires. The peasants would gather them in barrels and leave them in a shed, then Mother and I with a gaggle of peasant children would sort and bathe each wretched creature twice. Grading them by weight, we sewed them into linen bags forty centimeters long, to be picked up and taken to market by hawkers, usually the Fleischman brothers of later distillery fame. But the inexorable advance of medical science finally reached even our part of the world, and as bleeding went out of fashion, and plethoric, overfed gentlemen took to the waters, the value of our leeches necessarily became less, and our last source of hard currency flowed away.

  Save a milk cow, the cattle were butchered, and most of the fields reverted to scrub, causing a new chain of wildlife to establish itself with startling rapidity. Hawks clotted the afternoon sky. Foxes became bold as leopards. Storks stalked adders. Pigs charged horses. Cranes and eagles strutted everywhere, and fat, sleek owls sat like avenging buddhas in the crotches of conifers. Meanwhile, in my fa
ther’s breast a great happiness arose, even as his business continued to fail, for just as the French have the mystique of their fields and the Germans of their forest, my father’s religion was the edge, that manmade, regenerative tangle of stumps, burn-offs, inexplicable wetnesses, and covers, which the animal kingdom in its colonial period prefers above all things, and which provides the final illusion to townspeople who need to believe they are descended from great hunters and perspicacious gatherers. It was the happiness of watching agriculture and all its bonds and shackles being erased.

  Still, Semper Vero had to be rescued from its own mountain of debt, accumulated over centuries, and for a time my parents staved off the inevitable with tennis and French lessons for the gentry, whose heirlooms could still fetch cash. A walloping forehand and the languorous history of the future conditional allowed us a narrow margin for error in our decline. However, the day came when it was necessary to either sell off more fields or offer new services, and it was then that we began to take in others’ animals and pets. After realizing that none of the locals would pay good money to ameliorate a bad dog, Father ultimately took out a large ad for obedience training in the Sunday Therapeia Tagblatt:

  TIRED OF YOUR DOG?

  We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet, and of all forms of life which surround us, not one, save the dog, has chosen to make an alliance with us. It is not necessary to settle for just a pet.

  Specializing in nervous peeing, uncontrollable boors, and promiscuous barkers.

  Characterological reconstruction for the hardheaded, highly strung, and stupidly dependent.

  Serving the owner willing to admit his own errors.

  You may reply in confidence.

  FELIX A. PSALMANAZAR, L.L.D.

  SEMPER VERO

  MUDDY ST. HUBERTUS

  CANNONIA INFERIORE

  SCHARF

  (Iulus)

  The only reply was from the Professor, who cabled immediately from Therapeia and made an appointment for the following week.

  He arrived en famille, driving the coach heavy-handedly. In the boot of the closed black calèche, tied with a rope from his neck to the axle, sat a rude and mixed-up breed. They called him “Scharf.”

  My father ambled out to meet his first client, dressed in his smoking jacket, a freshly killed woodcock hanging on a thong from his belt, and stared up with his glacial blue eyes at the city boy and his sad-faced, black-frocked entourage. The Professor stared back, perhaps taken aback to see what appeared to be a calm English gentleman in the touchy heart of Europe.

  Scharf had leapt from the boot of the carriage to greet Father, but the rope to the axle brought him up short. The Professor moved quickly to disentangle him, and then, like a giant, mottled frog in harness, the animal dragged his black-suited master to Father’s patient hands. Felix quickly found the pressure points behind the strangely cut ears, and Scharf swooned as he massaged his bumpy skull. It was love at first sight—not of course, with Scharf, whose main problem was that he knew himself to be a pretext—but between the men, who now exchanged a considered handshake.

  As the calèche emptied its contents, it became evident that the Professor was encosseted with a company of women: his daughter, with piercing black eyes, hair plaited in a manner suitable for a grandmother, though she was five or six at the most; his mother, who had similar eyes and a firm peasant jaw beneath an outrageous red velvet hat of the newest style, looking thirty years younger than her age and unembarrassed by her aura of total self-absorption; and finally his wife, a plain, pale, humorless woman who could have been thirty or sixty, clearly ill at ease in the great out-of-doors—a woman, he surmised, who either suffered from sleeping sickness or had been traumatized by giving life. The Professor’s attitude toward them all was at once devoted, exacting, and absent, and for Father too they quickly disappeared from his mind forever.

  “Welcome, welcome to the land of the three wishes.”

  Mother had appeared on the veranda in all her golden glory, hair falling about her shoulders, a welcome tray of raspberry-colored spritzers in her hands. Entranced, the Professor dropped the rope and dreamily advanced up the curving stair, clearly disoriented but homing in on Mother’s golden bee. She said something sweetly inaudible, and his right hand came up to his heart as he bowed. Felix was gazing into Scharf ’s eyes, the Professor into Ainoha’s. The other women held onto one another. The air was full of incipient disaster. But as the Professor toasted his hostess and greedily drank his spritzer, walking downstairs backward to regrasp the rope which Felix had held for him, Ainoha realized at once, as so many times before, that she had rendered the other women invisible and must immediately deal with the consequences. She set down the tray, descended the stair and pried the dour child’s hand from her mother’s. Then she took the dazed wife’s arm as a man might at a cotillion, and matching the fierce stare of the red-helmeted mother, escorted them all to the grove, where Cherith’s Brook careened around its stony corners, exposing the gnarled roots of horse chestnut trees and providing sufficient grottos and ladders for the least inquisitive of animals.

  No word had yet passed among the men; it was as if we were in a silent film running backward. The three of us stood alone with Scharf in the courtyard. The animal read my father immediately, rolled over and over, twining the rope about his neck so as to strangle himself, and in the process jerked the Professor to his knees. The men took each other’s measure, and the courting began. Father crouched to wind up the coils of rope and, laying one hand on the Professor’s knee while the other rested even more gently across the animal’s foam-flecked mouth, inquired with a dry laugh:

  “And what seems to be the problem, Herr Doktor Professor?”

  From his knees, the Professor twisted his huge head to one side and came right to the point:

  “He won’t mind.”

  Felix stepped across Scharf ’s tummy, his four legs were now rigid and pointing to the heavens. “Ah, yes,” he murmured, “there appears in his makeup a great distance from the lip to the cup.” Then he pointed out that Scharf was apparently a cross between the rare stickelhäar and the now extinct Polish sea-hound, a point of origin which seemed to hold no interest for his client.

  “How did you come by this animal?” Felix inquired.

  The Professor shrugged. “My daughter. She wanted an orphan. She picked him out at the doghaus.”

  “And this is your first family pet?” A question to which he already knew the answer, so didn’t listen to the reply.

  The Professor had raised himself up, and dusting off his knees, emitted a huge sigh. “He’s turned out to be . . . a kind of joke!” he blurted.

  “A tragical joke, it seems,” Felix added, taking the coil of rope softly from his client’s hands.

  “Exactly. Though I confess I’ve developed a sort of strange affection for the animal and his perversities.”

  Scharf ’s paws were now milling in the air as he dug a furrow of gravel with his skull.

  “Does he make you feel safer in your home?”

  “On the contrary,” the Professor said candidly, “the entire house has been arranged in his defense.” Then, more softly, “If the truth be told, he spends most of the day in the children’s beds.”

  Felix nodded gravely. He had seen many similar cases among those reared in the doghaus, he explained—a particular form of neurasthenia in which the animal took to bed in the prime of life, choosing a soft landing when he ought to be charging through the park and challenging everything that moves. Lacking human stimulation in his early youth, he went on wearily, the dog becomes equally unresponsive to love or fear.

  “This dog has thrust himself between the legs of your life, forcing his way into your heart, and there he proclaims, if you even think of dislodging him, if you say so much as ‘go out and play,’ that he will kill himself!”

  “Extortion by defenselessness?” the Professor queried.

  “You are on the right track. You see, he doesn’
t want to get any better, because that might mean losing what little he has.” And he looked down with pity at the bland criminal groveling upside down in his drive.

  “The dog does virtually nothing,” Felix went on, “yet you say he does not mind. There is, if you will permit me, a contradiction here.”

  The Professor was rapidly warming to the role of the interrogated. “Well, yes, go on, then.”

  “Does the animal in question prefer any of you?”

  The Professor seemed at a loss.

  “Your daughter, perhaps?”

  The Professor reflected at length, then, folding his arms: “He prefers my daughter’s . . . bed.”

  Felix stared kindly at him. “The animal in question does not love you,” he said softly, “and this is an affront.”

  The Professor nodded. “There is no dignity . . .”

  “He doesn’t give a fig for dignity!” Felix interrupted. “What is worse, if I may say so, is not so much that he is ill, but that the illness bores you!”

  The Professor was fidgeting, shifting from foot to foot. “It is true,” he muttered, “that in this animal there is not a great deal to admire.”

  “So the problem, really, is whether this ‘joke,’ as you put it, will become even more tragical. Or perhaps more interestingly, how much tragedy a joke can stand.”

  “You put it well, although I fear we have left poor Scharf behind in the richness of the diagnosis.”

  “That should be the clue that there was not much there to begin with.”