In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  Cannonia was the only place in the European theater that had not yet seen action, an island of calm, a mote of silence in which dog shows were still regularly scheduled beneath aerial dog fights, and indeed, under the pressure of invasion, the populace had become, from all evidence, even more lighthearted, carefree, and erotically active than ever. During our bombing runs they repaired excitedly to their cinemas and cafes in the saltmines, cheerfully attesting to the Roman observation that “the best part of Cannonia is underground,” as well as their local slogan, “to be well hidden is to live well.” We were always somewhat taken aback at how well fed the Cannonian civilians seemed to be. During a lull in the advance on Dede-Agach, we were taken by damsels in white dresses and parasols to a chocolate factory where the sugar ran higher than my boottops.

  I had left the crystal decanters and chandeliers of OSS (Oh So Secret) London so hastily that no one had backgrounded me on Cannonia. Our man behind the lines had brought the good news out for nothing, I was to take the bad news back at salary, the only distinction between enlisted man and officer, as far as I could see. My mission was straightforward: walk the cat back to Dog Cannonia, make contact with Iulus, and pick up the Holy Crown, the symbol of the nation’s legitimacy, before the Russians could snatch it.

  One of my old college chums, Ed Kirby, then as now a reliable courier, rode with me to the aerodrome. He seemed uncharacteristically nervous, stroking his not prominent chin and crossing and recrossing his unmilitary wingtipped brogues. But he had my orders directly from the Potomac. In essence they were this: the Hron was our stopline. Make no commitments of any sort. We should assist any retreating Germans (Marshall Zhukov was quite right to complain about this) and should we encounter any Russians, be prepared to exchange small presents, and avoid wearing your good pistol or expensive watch.

  Ed had brought with him the Cannonian file. There was nothing in it but a yellowed Herald Tribune clipping about some unpaid World War One reparations, railway schedules from the 1930s, a letter from the Rockefeller Foundation refusing a grant to rebuild a Cannonian cathedral, as their guidelines precluded funding a pagan institution, as well as portions of the diary of a seventeen-year-old daughter of an Austrian diplomat who had taken a pony cart tour at the turn of the century. “The wind blows differently here,” she began.

  Ed’s own knowledge of Cannonia seemed to be restricted entirely to memories of Comp Lit at Princeton. “The Cannonians believe that every life, like every book, has three beginnings and three endings, but there’s no choosing between them. One must accept them all. That’s the Cannonian twist, their Triplex Philosophia. There’s always a twist in Cannonia,” he said somewhat sarcastically. “Stand fast and wait to be contacted.”

  Those were Ed’s grinning last words as he saw me aboard the blacked out DC-3, handing me a copy of American Plans for a New Cannonia —a tome, to tell you the truth, I have never finished to this day. Suffice it to say that as the Cannonians had perfected bourgeois life to its ne plus ultra (a source of particular fascination to the Soviets) their history was one of continual collaboration with any government which had the temerity to announce itself, and their insatiable pursuit of private pleasures made them the most unreliable allies imaginable. We had not taken their foolish and comic declaration of war upon us seriously, and while they might well be “damned inconvenient,” as Sumner Wells put it, our interests there were not material, and our policy was one of “limited encouragement.” Nevertheless, as a kind of farewell present to the Soviets, whose appallingly mauled remnants were now making their appearance amongst us, it was thought that we might contact and offer support to a potential guerrilla force, a semi-nomadic tribe known as the Astingi, allegedly the last tribe of prehistory to keep their name and language intact. Free of all modern malaises, the Astingi would fight at the drop of a hat. “To be vanquished and not surrender—that is victory” was their slogan. Their brief, “to prick every woman in the world as well as every Empire.” They had fought with Napoleon in 1805 and against him in 1809, fought with Lafayette in 1775 and with the British in 1812, and were even said to have intervened in our Civil War, somewhere in Florida. They had no heroes, no myths, no lost nation, and no promised land. They neither founded nor wandered. They had come from nowhere and disappeared into nothing, long-nosed, subtly smiling, and sensitive-footed, moving only at night, leaving no traces above the ground, mystifying the barbarians with their imperturbable discipline and appalling the Romans with their permissiveness (the husbands actually sitting down to dinner with their wives).

  They were by now the most rugged race left on the planet, jolted on horseback from the day they were born, occupying the great crystal clear high Plateau of Crisulan at the source of the Hor, an area by turns parched as the Sahara, barren as the Gobi, and cold as the Arctic, where the tallest plant to be found is the wild onion, and more impractical to the explorer than either of the poles. They believed in neither God nor the Devil, nor in the sacraments any more than the resurrection of the dead. Christians, Pagans, and Musselman alike had termed Cannonia the “country of the unbelievers.” Yet the Astingi apparently always had everything they needed. “Even their dog leashes were made of sausages,” as Herodotus noted. They thought the Cossacks wimps, the gypsies too sedentary, the Jews passive-aggressive, the gentry unmannered, the peasants too rich by half, the aristocracy too democratic, and the Bolsheviks and Nazis too pluralistic. When cornered, they would put their women and children in the front ranks, and fire machine guns through their wives’ petticoats. And in times of peace they were renowned for their impromptu traveling performances of Shakespeare and Chekhov. The only belief they shared with Americans was that the entire world was constituted of rings of peoples set up to protect them.

  Their women, nimble, handsome, and accommodating, were celebrated for their extraordinary carriage and complexions varying between pink and bronze. The infidelity of wives was punished by a mild beating, while that of men by a fine of cattle. The men were famous for their outspokenness, friendliness, and nonstop humor. They seemed to be everything I admired—handsome, intelligent, and reckless, with a healthy relation to life and oblivious to death.

  To be honest, I didn’t see we had much to offer them. Indeed, I had noticed in London that our intelligence briefings had become more complex and arcane as our forces approached the border. I took little interest in the internecine struggles our specialists described, backing one bandit one day then changing their allegiances the next. It was clear only that Cannonian politics were as gnarled, fecund, and impenetrable as their landscape, as useless to themselves as to others, and that a military mind could not even begin to plot their intricacy. So it was not surprising that our analyst’s lectures petered away self-consciously as glazed stares from the ranks became the norm.

  But arriving at the front, I heard quite a different story. Among the guys, Cannonia was simply referred to as Terra XX, where it was rumored there was a secret redoubt at the exact geographical center of the continent, filled with art masterpieces, one hundred tons of gold, and heavy water, guarded by a battalion of yellow-eyed dogs and seven-foot mountain men in scarlet tunics—a cache in its scope and preciousness which made Cannonia at that time the most cultured nation on earth, as they had been regarded in the fourteenth century when their treasury and library exceeded that of France. We had been told to stand fast, coil up our formations, and clean up our flanks, but you could sense the renewed “fighting spirit” among the ranks.

  This was not a novel notion. We knew that Hitler (“That handsome boy who never rode a horse,” as Iulus’s father called him) was constructing a vast redoubt in the Bavarian mountains from which to conduct a last stand, as well as house his art collection. As in the First World War, the only strategic reason for our bloody forcedmarch upon Cannonia was to cut off a potential German retreat. Our information was based on intercepts of cables from the Cannonian foreign minister, Count Zich, to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Oshima, offering shel
ter in Cannonia for the imperial family portraits, consistent with the traditional Cannonian foreign policy of keeping a foot in every camp, and further suggesting that the location of the true inner redoubt was in salt mines in the Unnamed Mountains of Cannonia, which already housed Hitler’s own Vermeer, The Artist in his Studio; the Ghent Altarpiece; the first page of the “Song of Hildebrand”; and a world-class collection of toy soldiers. Not for nothing did the advancing Soviet army carry with them carloads of art experts. Terra XX was to be defended to the death by a half-million, hand-picked men and women, the Wolverines, who were already infiltrating and toughening the SS, whose mission it was not only to prolong the war indefinitely, but to launch terroristic attacks throughout the continent from the most inaccessible part of Europe. Of course we know today that this was not precisely true. But I also know that the top-secret documents relating to it in the archives have been retrospectively falsified.

  In any event, our advance column breached the Hron and, leaving Dede-Agach and her wasp-waisted women, slowly negotiated the trackless wastes of the Marchlands on a southeasternly salient, without a single act of resistance, indeed without a single incident of any kind. Through our binoculars we scanned the villages where no flag flew, a village darkness like no other darkness. (“A land so poor that even the crows fly upside down to avoid seeing it,” was how an eighteenth-century traveler had described it.) In not-so-short order, outrunning our gasoline supplies, our armored column finally spread out over some seventy miles. Directed by scurrying jeeps and swooping Piper Cubs, we finally reached a perfectly unknown double-oxbow of the Mze.

  Breached for the first time since Napoleon, the Mze had proven a disappointment in every way. Planes had photographed it, engineers had studied it for months, generals had dreamed of nothing else. But when we got there it wasn’t as big as the Mississippi, or as beautiful as the Hudson, or as rough as the Colorado—just graygreen, cold, and unimpressive. “Never halt on the near side of a river, even if you do not intend to exploit the crossing.” Had that ancient injunction not been pounded into us in War College, we would have never have forged the Mze. As it was, the engineer in charge of the pontoon bridge was in despair when he was told it had taken him twelve hours longer than it had taken Julius Caesar. But soon our first column of tanks crossed the bridge, draped now with drying wash, captured flags, and laughing naked spitting boys. And an hour later, on the firmer ground of a glacier scour, our half-tracks crested the bluffs of yet another bend of the Mze. Downriver, a dozen locomotives were parked on a siding, alongside barges packed with knocked-down submarines. The trains had been blasted to smithereens, one locomotive pointing straight up, like a dog begging on its hind legs. The current was so stolid that it gave no reflection whatsoever. There was not even the trace of an eddy, a fleck of foam. It made not the slightest sound. “Let’s go down and piss in it,” my sergeant driver said, and so we did.

  Once relieved, I chanced to glance up, and on the far bank I could make out a band of silent mounted men, an Astingi advance guard which I recognized by their raspberry overcoats and high fur hats, something you don’t often see in April. They were gazing down at us paternalistically, as they had for three thousand years, witnessing the besmirched Matron of Christendom as she once again walked into their shallow stream to perish. After buttoning up their overcoats and letting off a single rifle shot, they held up an odd three-fingered salute and filed silently away behind a dome of rocks.

  So it was that we came to parade rest on Cannonia’s watery border, about to read her secretmost entrails, prepared to open a spacious wound in Hell’s own soil, dig out ribs of gold, and build a Pandemonium. We had no experience with that long tradition in which the cheerful and well-intentioned tyrant, with his perverse magnanimity and wooden hug, enters the ghostly empire to pick up the beautiful corpse, only to have it fall apart in his hands. Indeed, we believed, even more than the communists, that we had captured a stage of history—the worst thing, according to Astingi lore, that can befall a people.

  That night, all along the Mze, our artillery massed hub to hub, we lay down a coordinated fire the likes of which even the most battle-hardened veteran had never seen. The Conqueror was smiling in his chariot, and his horses smiled the same hard smile. You could read the dark book of history as if it were daylight; the barrage threw all the objective ground to be taken into bold and summary relief. We had been ordered to explode all four corners of Cannonia. But she never really caught, only smoldered. A stench of blasted muck hung over the country for years after the war as the louring Commander reined in his foaming steeds.

  We had hardly bivouacked when an old soldier came stumbling out of the forest in a uniform cobbled together from five or six nations, and began to spill the beans in several different languages before we even put him on the ground. His first words were a warning not to shell the barges down river, as they were loaded with poison gas. Then he added proudly that this was the exact spot he had surrendered in the First World War. “I can’t read or write,” he muttered, “but I can sing.” My rule then as now was to never interrogate a prisoner under forty, for you can learn little from a man who still thinks he has something to prove.

  I can’t say that we completely understood him, our proficiency in languages being of a strictly schoolboy nature, and it became increasingly clear that Öscar Özgur was something of an idiot, though quite calm and professional about it.

  But Öscar had in his possession a letter written on violet stationery in rather grandiloquent French, addressed to no one in particular, sealed with the waxen emblem of a petite noblesse terrienne, as well as the last attestatory secret code of our man behind the lines. There was also a latitude and longitude for a proposed rendezvous, and the promise of a bonfire burning. The family crest portrayed a nymph trying on a crown (the infamous Venus of Muranyi, I was to learn) astride an inscription: “Back to the original sources.” It concluded rather formally, with my contact’s swirling vermillion signature dusted with cinnabar.

  . . . Venez, si vous voulez, et recevez notre couronne.

  Nous causons souvant des delices de notre

  maison viste don’t le souvenir me s’effacera

  jamais de nos coeurs mille et mille amities.

  Sauve Que Peut, Iulus

  Naturally, the letter stunned me. Even the most dedicated student of Cannonian affairs could not have anticipated such a windfall. I admit I had the stench of priceless treasures and czar’s gold in my nostrils. My putative superiors were still well to the rear, and there was little point in torturing such a pathetic messenger with further cross-examination. Things were loose at the front in those days, my OSS papers invited no questioning from even the most belligerent rednecked MP, and the letter seemed to fulfill the spirit of my vague orders. I may have lacked Zeus’s stamina and colorful disguises, but I had his roving eye. I wanted to do things with Cannonia, some gently, some not so, some with long graceful movements, some with short automatic bursts. And then of course, I wanted to pick up her broken body and be cheered in the streets. These were not the naïve sentiments of a wild-eyed boy. That was always to be the fatal misapprehension of our adversaries. For we were born harsh, beyond the Gulf Stream. We only looked soft and shiny—like a larva, concealing a stinger enfolded in its heavy blond wings—a vast armada of Detroit steel and Texas oil, beneath a comic sheen. I was looking for no vista, I can tell you, no place to meditate, no real estate. When you grow up looking at nothing but billboards and telephone poles, and your only relation to the past is Euclidian geometry, you don’t mind looking, properly armed, straight into the jaws of hell. And in Cannonia, where the sky meets the ground like no place else on earth, at dusk everything is the color of a runaway dog.

  To tell you the truth, I never felt either courageous or foolhardy. I had spent most of the war pretending I wasn’t baffled. I never heard from anyone a patriotic sentiment. We were simply fatalistic. And we felt so much more akin to the Germans and the Russians that we could
hardly believe we were fighting with the English and the French. I mean let’s be honest about it. Was anything ever more fun than picking up the Europids—those peoples who have made an artform of feeling sorry for themselves—in their unparalled wickedness, and bringing them sternly to account? You can get away with murder in America, but only in Europe can you be really bad. My specialty and my nearsightedness had so far protected me from the more suicidal missions in which our men behind the lines had been my proxy. I had a burning desire to do good. And to kill somebody.

  Orders in my pocket and invitation in hand, I was nevertheless overcome by an anxiety I had never felt in battle, a horror vaccui, in which even a tear for our sacrifices would not flow. I have never felt such unease or uncomprehending fear as I did that late afternoon on the Mze. Old hands call it Fingerspitzengefuhl (fingertiptingling), and it is more addictive than sex. But what good is foretelling if you cannot forestall the disasters you foresee?

  I commandeered a jeep, and on a makeshift runway in a sugarbeet field, after presenting my doctored Joint-Chief-of-Staff ’s laissez passer, talked a bored flyboy into taking me up. I don’t know what kind of plane it was, only that the takeoff seemed longer than the flight.

  The manor house of Semper Vero squatted phlegmatically upon the flattened top of an eroded volcanic cone. From the base of the old volcano, blackened vineyards and chocolate-colored fields fell away on all sides, interspersed with patches of mustard flared with poppies. Each irregular field was partitioned with musk rose and yellow gorse, and every inch was cultivated to the very edge of a serpentine road which ended abruptly at the base of steep forested slopes. As Iulus poled me across the Mze, in a strange copper-prowed caique, I again consulted my maps, and realized that this rim of heavy dark primeval forest was the same wall of oak and beech that Marcus Aurelius had rightly feared as the home of the barbarian, and yet it was here, in the only forward outpost in which he felt truly safe, that he laid down his pen and died. The river at this crossing point seemed to be encased with sheets of steel.