The Professor, however, had apparently decided to inflict a public punishment on the cur, and took up Wolf ’s rope, coiling it about his arms and swinging the knotted end above his head a la gaucho. But before he could administer the chastisement, the animal lowered his head and began to pull like a mule, first in one direction and then in another, causing the Professor’s patent leather shoes to screech on the gravel like chalk on a blackboard. He glanced imploringly at Felix, throwing up his one free hand in a gesture of disbelief. And then, as if to certify the case, the shortened lead was snapped even more anarchically, until Wolf, wheezing against his collar with unbelievable persistence, lowered his shoulders, turned his toes in and elbows out, and with gravel flying from his paws, became a classic study in time and motion. The Professor managed to emit a deep sigh before he was again, as on his first visit, forced to his knees, but this time also flung forward on his face. Succeeding in making his point, Wolf immediately sat down and licked the considerable foam from the corners of his mouth, one yellow eye wandering like an expiring nova.
“You see,” the Professor groaned, lying on his stomach, “he wants to leave us! There is no master in this house.” The dog had yet to emit as much as a grunt.
Felix folded his arms and delivered his lay opinion that the dog had been pulled on so much that his natural impulse was now to pull himself, wanting like anyone to put a little loop into his future. And he could play this game only by exhausting his tenacious master. The good news was that the dog in question was not timid, not a layabout like dear departed Scharf. His illness was simply an inappropriate response to the stress of everyday life.
“He doesn’t want to run away, Herr Doktor. He just wants some slack.” The Professor took this in gravely and repeated it to himself as if he were translating from a foreign language.
“Then he’s not . . . a revolutionary?”
“If so, a very poor one.”
Closing one brown eye and rising to a knee, the Professor opined that perhaps the freedom and fresh air of Cannonia might ameliorate the situation. Felix shook his head slowly.
“When a bear is uncultured, you do not tie him in a forest.”
This brought forth from the Professor a huge shrug, as if from his very soul, signifying, “What is to be done, then?”
Felix looked the Professor in the eye and reached into an inside jacket pocket, where he always kept a delicate choke collar of the tiniest blueblack Dresden steel ringlets. He held the collar up for his client as a jeweler holds a necklace for the bride, making a shimmering circle of dark silver and iron.
“Training, Herr Doktor Professor, training,” he whispered, trilling the ns.
My father was a man of many pockets: one for tobacco, one for sweets, one for the Dresden collar, one for dry husks of bread, and one from which he now withdrew a crimson kerchief, which he knotted around his neck. He needed to work the dog without distraction, so he ushered the Professor into the house, where, not finding Mother at home, the visitor could be seen in the staircase window, faded and grave as in a daguerreotype. Through the leaded glass, he watched the two murky figures in the courtyard.
At first, Felix slowly circled the panting, spittleflecked Alsatian, moving with his back against a dark green privet hedge. Then he held up a husk of bread.
“Kominzeeheer, Wolfie.”
Trailing his rope, the dog approached tentatively, but then took the husk from Felix’s hand and walked about sniffing and scratching it like a chicken, while occasionally peering over his shoulder at the knotted rope, then back at his immaculate food source. Felix continued to pass out husks with one hand, while with the other he opened a large flapped pocket that had been lined with surgical rubber so that the blood of game might easily be removed. (He had one sewn in all his jackets, evening clothes included.) From this otherwise empty game pocket he now withdrew a strand of insulated electrical wire as long as he was tall. My grandfather Priam had refused to install electricity at Semper Vero, and the week after he died, his wife, age spots on her temples as large as silver dollars, had the entire house and every outbuilding wired, socketed, and telephoned. It was this original telephone wire—flexible yet holding a shadow of the shape your hands might give it—Felix now held, a line without hard edges which could be looped or straightened, and along which willed energy might run like no other conductor, alternating impulses of discipline and freedom.
Gently, he looped the steel ringlets about Wolf ’s neck, attached the telephone cord to one ring, and keeping plenty of slack, strolled along the privet hedge. Wolf grimaced and dug in, preparing to haul his newest interlocutor beyond the horizon. But just as the lead grew taut, Felix turned his wrist a quarter-turn, and keeping his elbow stationary, gave a delicate if abrupt jerk, as if he were scything through a single stalk of wheat. The Dresden collar slipped through itself and the ringlets popped tight on Wolf ’s larynx, emitting a click like a cartridge being chambered.
The dog’s eyes bulged, then he coughed politely, and rather than hauling stopped short. As he did so, the collar slipped back open and the cord went slack. Wolf was fleetingly aware of a parenthesis of liberation, the triumph of cessation, that moment when your lover allows you to take her by the throat while your own head is cradled in her hands like a melon.
Then my father coiled the cord, leaving the collar hanging loose, and Wolf walked beside him calmly, looking up occasionally in disbelief, as the figure in the window broke into silent applause, then raced down the staircase.
“To touch the compulsion,” the Professor expostulated breathlessly, “is near enough the soul . . . And you didn’t even have to hurt him!”
“I will never hurt him,” Father said evenly. “You must trust me.”
“The question is whether I can bear it,” the Professor sighed. For the first time his tone was somewhat jocular. “I only fear that he will come to prefer you.”
“These are the chances we all must take. Who knows who deserves whose loyalty? What do you want most of all, sir? What is your greatest wish for the dog in question?”
“I want him . . . to stay,” the Professor mused, “or if not precisely stay, at least not run from me.”
“You must not confuse running away with hauling. The question, I believe, is not one of disappearing, but of constantly jerking you about.”
“I still do not see how force . . . such manipulation can accomplish anything lasting.”
“Ah, well, don’t you see, it’s just the right amount of force, applied at exactly the right time and place. It takes a lifetime to learn, if I may say so.”
“Will you teach it to me, then?”
“Ah, my friend, you are not ready. Humans don’t have the sense to submit. The dog bites only hard enough to make a point. Yes, we think dogs almost human, and dogs think we are other dogs. Which do you think is closer to the truth? Remember St. Augustine: you won’t see God until you become as a little dog. When you are ready, the teacher will appear. That I guarantee.”
“I suppose you mean that we learn only by punishment!” the Professor intoned morosely.
“Not exactly. We learn by the threat of a thrashing administered against a background of love. Think of it as a loving withdrawal. Even gentleness must be enforced.”
“I still do not comprehend your preliminary diagnosis.”
“Well, if it’s analogy you want, I should say that what we have here is the soul of a horse trapped in the body of a dog.”
“Then poor Wolf believes himself to be a horse?”
“No. He knows he’s not a horse. He just wants to feel like a horse, because he believes the horse to be superior.”
“I’m not sure I grasp . . .”
“It’s like this. You don’t want a bottle of wine, do you? No, you want the feeling it gives. What we’re saying to Wolfie is, go right ahead and feel like a horse if you like. Just don’t behave like one when you’re around me.”
“This is hardly scientific, Councilor.”
&nb
sp; “Ah, dear friend, facts may be different, but feelings are the same. And it’s not the thinking that’s hard. It’s selling the thinking, Herr Professor.”
“In my experience,” the Professor muttered defensively, “one can often observe in human illness the neuroses of the animals.”
“Perhaps. But the satisfying thing about dogs is that they fear what actually happens, not fear itself. Therefore, the teacher must constantly fight his way into reality, all the while maintaining detachment.”
“But how can we proceed before we locate the trauma, immaterial as it may be?”
“What do we start with, you say? My poor self and this poor dog. That is all. Our origins are different, our values are different, our ends are different. They are all incompatible and they cannot be pushed beyond their limits. But they can be imaginatively understood, if there is a cord, a simple cord.”
“It seems, if I may say so, a project fraught with risk.”
“Whenever you weigh beauty and utility on the same scale, a kind of genetic civil war is created within the animal. When you are stronger, I will elucidate the costs and lessons.”
“But might a dog behave and not be well?”
“We are not concerned with the whole animal, because that leads us into ideology. Life is all concealed pistols and waxed slipknots, Professor. All we can manage is to make the dog face the facts.”
“The verdict, then; I tremble.”
“Ah, Wolf is so much a product of our time. The greater he contests your authority, the greater his need for authority. His willfulness is mirrored back at him, and he becomes even more disappointed with himself. The result is discontent without reference, for which there is no answer. All we have is demand—perverse, obstinate, insoluble, interminable demand! And so the therapy can never end. Are you prepared for such an outcome?”
The Professor walked in circles, squinting and pulling on his moustache.
“It would appear, Councilor, that I have little choice in the matter.”
Smoking their cigars, they walked arm in arm along the darkening river. Wolf and I gamboled after them, tripping one another up. I threw a stick in the water and the dog looked at me with disdain. He was getting better already.
“It’s all so vague and problematical,” the Professor mused. “How do you stand it, Councilor?”
“The transferal is incomplete, my friend, it is always incomplete. It’s the nature of the mechanism.”
“Why do you suppose they love us so? And why do we even bother with them?”
Father stopped, and as they turned to look over the fields, delivered himself of something like a courtroom summation:
“This attachment to man is not born of consciousness, nor does it become conscious. Man, through the insensitivity of objects, feels homesick and alone. In his depths there is an earnest cry for intercourse. When he looks at things, they do not appear different; when he utters his cry there is no response. His conversation with nature has been silenced. The dog is the only one who remains, his reminder of the world of nature that has vanished. Snatched from our place in nature, all love seeks that which is lost, all that which is not itself. In the shimmering heat in the silent fields, we hear in the cry of the animal a call for companionship. The stronger the man, the more vulnerable he is to this. Then the dog finally comes, and together they search for unreal shelter.”
The two men stood with their arms about each other’s shoulders, discussing the mysteries of coordination and conduct, staring out into the unkempt fields in which huge hares bounced like kangaroos and quail called cloyingly to one another as raptors wheeled in the thickening sky. Wolf shoved his head in the tall grass, while leaving his body well outside the green envelope. A gadfly was playing about his limp tail.
“So,” the Professor mused, “we are back to the Jurassic. Horsetails high as oats, saurians running about.”
“Ah yes, my friend,” Father said proudly. “Out here in Klavierland we are truly, absolutely . . . nowhere!”
They agreed that as unpromising as Wolf was, he deserved an indefinite trial, provided the Professor would visit regularly and participate in the great experiment.
“So,” the Professor sighed, “Wolf is a real survivor.”
“Sentimentality will shorten your life, my friend,” Father said softly. “One must be on guard with survivors. They will damage you.”
IN DARKEST CANNONIA
(Rufus)
The Agent known as Iulus had the grave dignity and easy familiarity of the Cannonian gentry, taciturn and intent, without a hint of either fear or braggadocio. This was not, as I would come to recognize, the dignity of the freeborn, but of those who have witnessed the ineptitude and transitoriness of all great powers, and despite an inferior environment, have refused to be robbed of value. His wiry frame, although delicate, was extremely purposeful, cradling the infuriating hand-eye coordination of the natural athlete. If you threw a comradely arm about him you were instantly aware of a tremendous tensile strength for his slight size, a deadly serious will with a lightness of touch. He was the essence of the Schwermut, with that indolent charm which combines the alertness of the northern sailor with the impassive expression of the Byzantine, a youth who was used to talking on equal terms with both adults and animals. At twenty-one he gave the impression of having tried everything and renounced everything. He had no complaints and no hopes. But there wasn’t a touch of bitterness or self-doubt in his manner, and it was easy to see why women would go crazy over him.
The relations between himself and the dogs were formal and respectful, not those of master and pupil, much less man and beast. It was an older notion of conduct—that in order to preserve the integrity of the relationship, a true friend never feels the necessity to declare one’s love. It seemed both man and animal were in touch with a discipline beyond them, which announced that friendship might turn into love, but never the other way about. I knew I was already out of my depth, and that was just fine with me.
We proceeded through successive islets of forest, each interval exposing us longer in the dawning light, until finally our cover disappeared entirely as we traversed a corridor of open stubble fields. On their thickened edges, scythed exactly as high as a man’s thigh, I could make out other canine shapes, moon-colored dogs isolated in small packs, loping along as if attached to us by invisible wires, a kind of flanking cortege.
Then suddenly the flat and uninteresting country opened up into a vast amphitheater of hills, rising like immense solidified waves, increasing in size as they receded to merge into a great blank wall of naked granite peaks on the eastern horizon. The dirty gray glacial scour of the finest pumice fell sharply to the turgid river. On the far side Iulus pointed to a manor house, hunched like a yellow cat taking the sun out of harm’s way. “The Cannonian paradise,” he announced softly, and it was then I first beheld Semper Vero.
I was attached (under the cover of Divisional Historian) to the counter-intelligence unit of the 20th Armored Corps, XII Division, 65th Infantry, U.S. 3rd Army, Operation Hercules, which had been stopped (or rather, politically halted) in April of 1945, on the west bank of the Hron, where you could smell Cannonia, as you can smell an island in the sea. We could have easily pressed on into Cannonia Inferiore and taken the heights along the Mze, but the men were hardly willing to risk all in the last days of the war, and in any event, even if Roosevelt’s sudden death had not paralyzed the command, the textbook terrain was unsuited to armor. No one had ever been able to maneuver militarily in those vast, rich, flat, and foggy marchlands, for the most part undrained, unchanneled, and uncharted.
Admittedly, we had been through a rough patch of days, the deliberate sigh of the 70 mm artillery, the blustering howl of the Nebelwerfers, the thin whisper of mortars, and the evil singing of the 88s. But once “Roosenheimer’s Butchers” (as they referred to us on the German radio) broke through and routed the last of those Nazi champion diggers, we found ourselves alone alongside the turgid, steely Hron, an
d relaxed.
Cannonia was the closest, cruelest country for a fighting man, a veritable manmade jungle, a combination of ingenious irrigation, assiduous ancient cultivation, islets of virgin forest, and other trophy features of constructed wild topography. Calculatingly preserved from ancient times as royal hunting, smuggling, and pleasure grounds, it made even saturation bombing problematic. Every vineyard stake was topped with a bayonet against parachutists, every pathway had a false bottom. Every cemetery cross was sharpened, and even the chimps at the zoo were said to be armed. One could apparently march all the way to Russia beneath a deep canopy of trees, camouflaged in the never-ending sound of rushing brooks. The strategic possibilities of its underground rivers and saltmines appeared to be endless, its villages were dispersed and pocketed as if by a master strategist, and the “countryside” was simply a euphemism for vineyards and fields of white asparagus bordered with impenetrable hedgerows, in turn separated by marshes and canals. The whole territory was slathered by the serpentine tributaries and lesser streams of the Mze, Its, and Vah. The only possible military movement through the country was either by deep canal or narrow winding roads lined with lopped-off oaks, grapevines thick as a man’s arm and a hundred times more resilient, not to mention thickets of mulberry and false gorse. Every copse provided a perfect ambush, every thickwalled granary a line of fire, every capacious courtyard a potential boobytrap. Tanks might pass within thirty yards of one another and never be the wiser. When it was hilly there was not so much as a crag or cave to give cover, while the spectral flatness of its oft-bloodied plains elicited hallucinations. In short, the country’s strangely cultivated wildness blotted out any normal apprehension.
In Partial Disgrace Page 9