In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  “Healing’s not pretty, Councilor,” the Professor concluded.

  As he left the building, Felix suddenly felt cheated and abused, and had the overpowering urge to tell the quack off, which made him look forward as never before to his next appointment—until he realized after glancing at the card that it was a year away.

  But as he sat stewing, he was aware of the muscles in his diaphragm relaxing, and for a brief moment felt that he was not fundamentally unlike everyone else in the world—a strange and disorienting experience for him.

  A NEW CHALLENGE

  (Iulus)

  This was the first trip the Professor had ever taken without a book. After hustling aboard an express at the glass-and-steel South Station and crossing the Hron by the Invaliden Bridge, he sat stupefied before the window, watching rearward as the endless gasflares, smokestacks, and open-pit furnaces of the industrial suburbs drifted past. Referred to as “The Tannery,” this blasted stretch never failed to make a dour impression, furnishing an unlimited portico of scenes for rich, recurrent nightmares. That people could take the local and actually get off and go to work in this hellish scene was beyond him.

  The Monstifita station was located off a spur which terminated in a ruined cloister serving as a train shed. Here the restaurant car was decoupled and attached to a Belgian steam engine with a squat body and disproportionately large chimney. Men with grimy fingernails crowded the zinc counter for beer and cigarettes as the train moved out along the suspension railway toward the spa town of Sare.

  As the little train traipsed along its miles of timbered superstructure, it sent up a pale feather of smoke. In the yellow fog of morning, the peonies were dropping their last petals and the lime trees were in flower.

  Upon alighting, the Professor and his dog were surrounded by Skopje, gigantic yet fleshy Russians in black caftans who believe that Christ never died but wanders the earth in different forms, and will come again when the great bell of Uspenskisobor sounds. They offered him his choice of gigs: fan-tailed or tub-bodied; a chariotee, rockaway, or volonte; a stanhope, tilbury, or cabriolet; a victoria, barouche, or laundolet. Also available were a sedan chair, a hammer box, and a lineika (a six-wheeled Russian equatorial carriage), as well as an American invention, a three-wheeled gig with the third wheel in front in close connection to the shafts. The Professor chose an older, half-closed brougham with lemon sateen side-panels, a piebald mare who stared at his beard as if it were a new sort of hay, and the shortest and calmest of the drivers, who at six and a half feet could barely contain himself. His sallow skull was shaven in front, with flapping plaits fastened by clasps to his forehead, and his caftan embroidered with scrolls and flowers.

  “And where can I take your Excellency?” he inquired in a high-pitched voice.

  “To the river landing, if you please. The cost?”

  “Whatever you like, your Excellency,” the coachman said as he whipped the beautiful fat bottom of the mare.

  Gypsies fiddled, lepers begged, and drunks beat up one another as the brougham sped along polished cobbles, dodging a plentiful fall of steaming horseapples clotted with peppermint. Like phantoms in a fairy tale, they proceeded at a bone-jarring trot through the villages of Nask, Luda, and Zaza. Along the road, rain had eroded the soil a dozen feet down, and the Professor could make out traces of former roads passing through the valley, one on top of the other, Turkish gravel overlaying medieval slag overlaying heavy Roman paving stones. Once through the three-gated military border with its bevy of moneychangers and louche soldiers, King Pevney’s Royal Way opened before them into that degenerate forest of well-levers which bordered the Marchlands, where for twenty leagues the land had not changed in thousands of years. This was a remnant of a pre-settlement expanse, like those undulating plains which once spread from Kenya to Mozambique and Wisconsin to Texas—oak-studded savannahs intertwined with clumps of forest, wetlands, blowholes, and tallgrass prairie, cleansed by naturally occurring fires, pumped clean by slithering aquifers and artesian wells, a shimmering green carpet studded with wildflowers that popped up any time of year, usually after a fire or some mysterious subterranean lucubration.

  For the first few miles, the Professor drowsily watched the coachman’s huge back and the lobes of the horse. After a few hours, though, he began noticing portions of the road sticking to the brougham’s wheels, as Homeric clouds gathered above. The next thing he knew, the carriage was driving up the bed of a tributary.

  “Captain!” the Professor called out.

  “Sir.”

  “Don’t you think we shall be drowned?”

  “Yes, sir, I do! May I offer your Excellency a cigar?” Which the Professor accepted as the coachman, making a desperate effort, succeeded in climbing the right bank. But then after a short jaunt cross-country, he drove straightaway into a lake.

  “Captain, have you a cigar left?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, give it to me quick.”

  Jolting from ditch to quagmire, water to mud, and back to water, they finally arrived at the steamer landing.

  On further inquiry about the fee, the coachman said only, “We won’t need a judge to settle it, your Excellency. Next time, you really should go to the opera.” And he seemed more than happy with ten gulden.

  The steamer Desdemona had started her career with a rudder at each end and a small hut on deck, her huge paddlewheels driven by horses on a capstan inside the hull. When a British firm, Andrews and Richard, bought the ship, a coal stove took over for the horses, and the hut was replaced by an elegant mirrored saloon with red plush couchettes. A diving bell sat funereally upon the stern. The new captain, a weather-beaten English seafarer, knew no more about the sandbanks of the Mze than the bed of the Yellow Sea, and so at flood-time the ship was often found marooned in the middle of a field. The engineer was Scotch and would happily explain mechanical details of the operation, while the jolly Italian cook always kept a pot of bouillabaisse on the boiler.

  It took three quarters of an hour to load the carriages, the stevedores cackling and the peasants crossing themselves. Then the ship’s whistle sounded, a small cannon boomed, and the Desdemona shuddered away from the slimy embankment, the paddlewheels churning up water lilies and duckweed as it bore new shortcuts into the rank abundance of the river’s huge loops. Countless waterfowl rose from the dead estuaries—cormorants and kingfishers, herons and egrets, warblers and martins—and from the dark walls of alder and poplar, hungry, chirping nestlings in a thousand nests craned their naked necks.

  The river course seemed to have changed substantially in only a month. The passage was most dreary, winding among queer little villages well back from the treacherous banks and monstrous hills covered with hideous, half-pruned vineyards, while the river emitted a peculiar hissing like soda water. They saw neither sail nor oar, and it was difficult to even make out the direction of the current. But the cook enlivened things by making pancakes stuffed with pickled walnuts, and occasionally while rounding a bend, the Professor was taken aback by adorable women in lilac and lavender walking fully dressed into the river up to their armpits.

  Inside the mirrored saloon of the Desdemona, the Professor recalled his first sight of Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar. Confirming his worst suspicions out here in the country, his host had come out holding a riding crop and wearing a tweed Chesterfield smoking jacket, twill jodhpurs, and a floppy fedora protruding a long pheasant feather. How well he knew the type. Here stood the very symbol of the moral pathology of the West, genteel, courteous, and above all handsome, a “Christian gentleman” and sportive hunter-magistrate—all a glittering illusion covering over the sickness of society, distracting the masses from reality. Had not Spengler himself identified the gentry as the most reactionary of classes? The Professor knew this privileged caste and its hypocritical code all too well. Oh, it all sounded sportsmanlike—“No hitting below the belt!” and “May the best man win!”—but every generous and graceful gesture obscured a base struggl
e for power. He imagined his host drinking himself into insensibility each night over a game of cards, then walking a seven-minute mile in the morning to sweat out the toxins, followed by a bit of tennis or high jumping (nothing that would make you appear a clown, of course), before heading out for an agricultural congress or a junket to fix an election.

  But then from behind Felix had appeared, sheathed in shot silk, the most beautiful creature of any species the Professor had ever seen, walking at a slightly impossible angle, like a ballerina falling out of a fouetté. Here she was, the perfect trophy companion for our sportive hunter-magistrate! (Why is it always the man of orthodox views who gets to bed the girls by the cartful?) As Ainoha proffered a tray of spritzers and bogberry jam, the traditional Cannonian welcome, the look of her had sent a crackling over his heart which he had experienced only among Italian ruins at dusk.

  “The Mze is a very bad neighbor,” the captain of the Desdemona grumbled to the Professor down in the saloon. There were landslides every minute. Boulders tumbled along fans of scree, and portions of forest collapsed before his eyes. They bumped along sunken bars of quartz, reconnoitered newly regurgitated islands, and dodged fallen logs, varying their course through new obstructions the river had created for itself. Bighorn sheep jumped from ledge to ledge on the creeper-plumed cliffs, and there now seemed miles of nothing save the antlers of dead boughs, crowned with mistletoe and hunched bald eagles. When they did reach a village, enormous white awnings had been cranked open, but only dogs were about, vicious as dingos, trotting down the shuttered lanes. The Professor nevertheless felt full of energy, for you only fully exist when you are in a lost province.

  Then Ferryland, latifundia of the Astingi, opened up, a chocolate-colored expanse striped by barley and hay, scattered with poppies, horses swishing their tails, sheep up to their bellies in daisies, and everywhere the bangs of hunting guns. A few girls in the fields waved their sickles at the Professor, and by the time they reached the ruined piers at Dragon’s Teeth and the patiently waiting Moccus pulling a hooded lilac gig, all his ideas were again being hushed.

  As the windless pillar of smoke above Semper Vero came into view, the Professor noticed some Astingi children in a clearing, charging about good-naturedly on their golden ponies, and playfully brandishing short, curved swords. They wore intricately braided jerkins (a doublet which it was said could deflect any arrow not entirely on the mark) and the Professor could make out some Astingi girls setting up melons atop fence posts, while one by one the boys thundered down the line at full cantor, leaning out of their stirrups and lopping the melons cleanly in half. The girls replenished the practice course with whole fruit as they feasted on the shards, spitting the seeds out in great arcs, as lesser men might lag pennies, and the boys waved gleefully to the stranger as they abruptly reined up their mounts. It was a silent and dignified affair, marred by not so much as a war whoop or girlish squeal. Even the hoof beats were barely audible in the soft Cannonian earth.

  At length, however, one rider struck out toward the gig, waving his saber menacingly, and the Professor broke into a nauseating sweat, realizing that in all this vastness there was not a single place to hide. But some fifty meters away the boy sheathed his weapon, leaned out from the horse, and with his head dangling near its hooves, plucked a sapling straight out of the ground. Then, swinging upward in triumph, he grinned, revealing a golden triangle in his front teeth. At this moment the Professor felt he had wasted his entire life.

  The Astingi were neither an ethnic group nor a nation, neither a religion nor a movement. The only barbarian tribe to keep its name and language intact, even their race was difficult to tell, as they were usually covered with a grime of coal smoke, and their reddish-blond hair turned black in old age. They had no monuments, no ruins, no book, and they spoke a language unknown to their neighbors—indeed, to whom they were intelligible, besides animals, is not quite clear. A popular academic surmise held they were the remnants of a species of Homo erectus that had elsewhere died out without evolving into us. But they were not the proto-us. They were superior to us.

  Geographically, they neither founded nor wandered, but in summertime occupied the high plateau of Crisulan, where the tallest plant to be found is the wild onion. In winter they returned to their black tents on the outskirts of town, sending their brown children out to beg by feigning blindness, retardation, leprosy, and other crippling injuries. Often they brought their performing dogs to Silbürsmerze: one danced with cymbals hanging from its hips, another sang along with his master’s falsetto war cries. Some charged and withdrew upon wordless commands; one dropped pebbles in a vessel so as to bring the water level to his lips, then begged for an ice cream cone. Another presumed, after looking you up and down and sniffing your hand, to snuff out a dittany from one hundred herbs for what ailed you.

  In Roman times, whenever a barbarian tribe revolted—whether the Roxolani, the Jazyges, the Suebi, the Parthians, or the Basternae—their actions were blamed on the Astingi roiling behind them, though truth be told, the Astingi preferred to watch from their unassailable plateau as various predacious hordes rode operatically back and forth, creating the stage sets of Europe. These settlers were often confused as to whether they were invaders or refugees, finding the interior more densely crowded than the conditions they had left behind. Meanwhile, to the front and rear, the Imperium harassed them continually, apparently just out of spite, as social convulsions flooded them with psychopaths, criminals, bitter intellectuals, and masses of people so genetically and culturally broken that they could neither give nor take, but only expire slowly in their midst.

  For the Romans themselves, the Astingi territory marked the northeastern frontier of the empire, which may have been why Marcus Aurelius, a frequent visitor to Cannonia during the interminable campaigns against the barbarians, chose to retire there and finish his meditations inside a fortress looking out at the ephemeral riverbanks of the Mze. Dying, he watched one day as a raft loaded with Astingi foundered in the river, its helpless soldiers swept off among ice floes. Not one of them, nor their officers on shore, shouted or bemoaned their fate. They did not even gesticulate while wordlessly awaiting death in the icy water. For the first time the Prince could not arise at dawn, and denouncing himself in his day book, turned over on his couch. Looking as he was through the rose window of the West, when the old gods were dying but Christ had not yet appeared, the warrior-prince-against-his-will had come to believe that if the soul were virtuous, one might look out to eternity, and there would be nothing new for future generations to witness, for the world is both good beyond improvement and evil beyond remedy.

  The gig burst around the crest of the volcano, flying through the translucidity. Father noted with relief that the Professor had arrived alone, as promised, though the springs of the lilac gig still seemed weighted down with the memory of their collective despondency. Yet in the boot stood a different dog, pure Alsatian by appearances, tied with the same rope. Rearing up on his hindlegs, the animal jerked his head like a parrot, looping strings of spittle across the Professor’s black homburg, and as the gig swung to an abrupt stop, the dog toppled out and hung, eyes bulging, tongue a royal purple, until Felix cut him slack.

  The Professor seemed more downcast and disoriented than on his first visit, but nevertheless rushed over before Felix could say a word, vigorously pumping his hand while explaining that Scharf had suddenly sniffed freedom, broken away from his wife on the evening walk, and been cut in two by an electric tram. The Professor, driven wild by his sobbing women, had gotten a replacement the very next day from the doghaus, though in this admission Felix could discern no real grief or contrition. And it did not bode well, he noted, that the present dog, despite being in such evident pain, had not cried out.

  Ainoha had prepared a hare fricassee for lunch, and Felix was happy enough to postpone investigation of the Alsatian, tying him to the axle on a short lead with a slipknot, hoping no doubt the dog might do away with himself. When as
ked why he had again chosen a companion for life who had been so obviously and cruelly abandoned, the Professor could only say that the doghaus officials had assured him that the animal was of the noblest, purest stock, the absolute favorite of a landed Russian family of the finest northern German origin, the sort of people who had kept their servants standing in the orangery with torches throughout the killing frosts of the recent troubles, and when rightly alarmed by the czar’s appointment of a parliament, had hastily emigrated by freighter from Odessa, and now lived in the most reduced condition in the Therapeia ghetto, where they had reluctantly turned over the Alsatian, their last proud possession, to the care of the state. The long sea voyage had no doubt unsettled the animal, the doghaus officials opined, but his superior breeding would undoubtedly resurface once the trauma of losing his fortune and his homeland, as well as his constipation, subsided.

  Felix put on his gamest face throughout this exculpation, interjecting only that with this animal, at least the nature of the abuse was clear, as was often the case with tumbled aristocrats. However, after coffee on the terrace, the Alsatian bit him fiercely when untied.

  “You see—the children call him Wolf!” the Professor fairly shouted.

  Father bore pain as well as any man I ever saw, and with one hand still clamped in the brute’s jaws, staunched the flow of blood with his free hand, somehow making out of his pocket-handkerchief a tourniquet. If the Professor was embarrassed, he was also plainly intrigued by his host’s ambidextrous stoicism, which gave his apology—signaled by the arc of his eyebrows—a rather forced and detached air, his curiosity overcoming his identification with another’s misfortune, which any normal person would of course find quite unforgivable.

  Felix decided to rescue a bad situation by making it didactic. He allowed his encaptured hand to go limp as a fish in Wolf ’s mouth, then gave it a friendly shake or two. Realizing that he had perhaps overreacted, the dog reconsidered the amputation, which, as Father was wont to demonstrate, could also be a kindness. The Alsatian’s ears arched as he released Felix’s hand with a small pop, a string of saliva tinged with blood still conjoining them.