In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  Then I produced the packet of LIBERTY margarine I had carried with me from the Meat Museum, with its bullet of carrot coloring at the center. Iulus stared at the deathwhite glob with undisguised disdain. I broke the nodule and the fluorescent amber dye spread throughout the plastic globe, its ugly streaks very much like the rays of a burst sun which figured so often in the crests of the Central Empires. It became striped as the dawn in Cannonia, though harsher and stranger. I kneaded this little distended synthetic world, pushing here, pulling there, until it gradually reassumed its ovoidal shape, colorized into a new alloy, piss yellow and old gold. I haven’t the faintest idea why I did this.

  A frieze around our empty dining room announced all the secret societies of the masculine and feminine temperaments, which did not clash as much as they fitfully and fantastically informed upon one another. Against a molding of the purest white and gold, blue Wedgewood medallions of young ladies in classical white dresses shot bows and arrows, played blind man’s bluff, or cavorted with boars and dolphins. The chairs were lyre-backed Chippendale, the tea service bronze, the oval table black pearwood. And interspersed among these refined objects were mahogany and walnut cabinets stuffed with rifles, maps, documents, busts of emperors, heavy decanters, half-open annotated books, tobacco jars from every country, stoneware, earthenware, and striped agateware. The walls held a great number of recumbent odalisques, all smoking, each more seductive than the last, painted in a rather crude but very up-to-date art nouveau style, though pride of place was given a tall portrait of a great beauty in a soldier’s uniform with an eye patch (his sainted mother, it turned out), whose cyclopean golden gaze presided over all. There was also an enormous sooty rectangle over the piano testifying to a huge but recently removed canvas, no doubt a spoil of war, as well as a portrait of Grandfather Priam, who needed no introduction, given his half-closed eye and distant gaze to the East.

  After supper, we cut a long Virginia cigar in half, and smoking it in relays, walked in the secret passage to the subterranean great hall lined with the portraits of former owners of Semper Vero, most of whom had never been near the place in their lives. They were painted in the early Cannonian iconic style, no texture to their furs, medals brighter than their eyes, a two-dimensional condition that I had no problem identifying with in the torchlight. I cannot to this day bear to spend more than fifteen minutes in a museum, but as I walked the great hall with Iulus, those floating transparent half-length images in reddish ochers, gold leaf, and velvety blues, their unselfabsorbed gaze radiating out and down from the axis of their bodies, formed a bond with each other and with me. They were not likenesses but presences. Theirs was not an attitude you could call beautiful, but one which promised somehow to restore fortune and confound enemies. No artist of the Renaissance could approach the ability to understand the virility, madness, and fire-breathing spirit in those tragic golden faces painted upon such programmatic human forms. Most had no frames, though some were equipped with winged doors so they might be closed. It was as if we were surrounded by a curious but friendly mob, full of contradictory emotions, their pride certain at the moment they had been transfixed, but also a supersensuous sadness for the future. In their imperceptibly glazed transitions, the reference for near and far was gone. In their temperas of egg yolk, rye beer, and ground alabaster, it was almost impossible to tell what was physical and what was reflection. Indeed, the panels must have been warped, like the curvature of the earth, or of the eyeball itself; and in the erratic light the brush strokes seemed composed not with temperas but blood and water, the dead matter of paint forgotten. It was as though the owners had all been painted at their last breath, and painted by the same person over five hundred years, so they were at once living and lifeless, imitating life from art. I felt their eyes saw me, and that their hearts understood me, those intercessors bathed in unconditional light.

  My life was changed in that moment. I wanted to be counted among the absentee owners of Semper Vero, even if only as temporary custodian. The rays from those golden faces upon my nose seemed more important than any idea I would ever have. I wanted only to see the world through their eyes. “Poor Giotto’s nothing compared to them,” Iulus shrugged as the torch burnt out and my happy indoctrination ended.

  I relieved myself in the single guest bath, a long high room with the watercloset set a good nineteen feet above the commode, featuring a quite large painting of a hoopskirted gentlewoman, black curls tumbling from her bonnet, who supported an impeccably dressed but slightly wounded soldier, his head resting on her shoulder, while she gently masturbated him. By comparison, this early Catspaw made the small Roualt over the washbasin seem somewhat academic. Not for nothing was this known as the finest lavatory in Cannonia.

  I found Iulus on the terrace, his hands folded behind him, gazing out over the embankment of the Mze. The coots had set up an unceasing shriek in the reed-beds, the primeval agony of a love-factory in late spring. I attempted to return our conversation to matters of the mission, and so inquired after the whereabouts of the Sicherheitshauptamt, that madman of a puppet premier who had inflicted so much needless suffering upon his poor nation. “One can hide forever in Cannonia,” Iulus murmured, “he might well be just down the road, asleep in phlox and snapdragons, or perhaps in the subterranean regions, where even the Russians will not find him. Or perhaps the Americans have offered him a professorship?”

  For the first time I saw a lethargic cynicism creep into his eyes as he took a seat.

  “You must be tired. I know I am,” he said. Then he sighed. “Is it permissible, to lose interest . . . even in evil?” he asked gently. And when I mumbled incoherently, “It must be possible to do something, you just can’t let all this go to the hell . . .” he reached across the wrought-iron table to put a cool hand over mine. “You can see that we are more pious, brave, and clever than the rest,” he said. “But you don’t seriously think we can be saved, do you?”

  At midnight, we went for a swim in the Crab Pond and bade farewell to our adolescence. We bedded down on the sofas with the dogs wound tight about us, and broke the ancient rule of war, both going to sleep at once without a sentry.

  Before first light I was awakened by hoofbeats. I peered out between the dusty damask curtains and could make out an Astingi patrol in jerkins of lilac, mulberry, and sulfur, bows and machine guns slung across their shoulders, winding single file down the fenlands from the source of the Mze. Their complicated demeanor was very like the frescoes of the former owners, at once both tranquil and agitated. Like their country, their aroma preceded them, a combination of dead lilies, saddle leather, jasmine, and mocha. They galloped once around the fresh grave mound in silent lamentation, and then wound their way down the drive, all pale hair and plumed shakos, lances and lopsided triple crosses. Their gray and white carts were tilted in their shafts from their burdens. Young girls in loose trousers, suckling buttoneyed infants, walked beside the black kneeboots of their mounted husbands, abetted by red rough-coated dogs and black unbelled oxen. Behind the last cart, on a silver chain, an eagle walked desultorily as a chicken. They moved in sluicelike silence, taking a shortcut around the town, and raising only a wisp of dust into the sunrise.

  Dawn came early and pallid as a lemon-rind as the sun rose out of Russia. It was time to get down to business. I reminded Iulus of the crown. He threw up his arms as if in a mock surrender, and led me, chuckling, across the cour d’honneur to a small Tudor cottage connected by a broken arbor to an unkempt cutting garden. He turned on the gas lamp, and we picked our way across a floor littered with smashed flowerpots and broken-handled rakes and spades. The cottage’s shelves were filled with old letter files, metal cigar boxes, small carriage trunks, matched plaid luggage, Gladstone valises, and a great profusion of loose, half-destroyed papers. “Observations of a literary nature,” he reassured me, “and without intelligence value.” In a corner, amongst a huge nest of shredded correspondence, framed in a whelping box constructed of a dozen inlaid woods,
a litter of just-weaned red pups yipped and scurried.

  The crown was hung on a peg near a small rear window, its dull golden gleam and rough unfaceted dark gems testifying to an ancient, unrefined smelting process. It was topped with a bent lopsided triple cross, an exciting pagan touch. He handed it to me casually, pointing out the fragment of the Pope’s gemstone, Gemma Augustea, and the Byzantine silvery filigrance of the first czar, Monomach. And then he related the Astingi curse attached to that bizarre object, which translates imperfectly as, “Wear the crown and lose your culture.”

  I also inquired, as instructed, as to the whereabouts of the Lost King.

  “The King is hidden,” he snapped, “and shall remain so.”

  Through the scent of milky feces, crusty gruel, and moldy paper, there was also the stench of fetid flesh wafting down from the sedge-green forest above us. He shot me a glance, and I knew it was useless to inquire further about our men behind the lines.

  Sensing my discomfort, Iulus flipped the crown back on its peg like a horseshoe, leading me next door to the ruined cloister, which served as a barn, and where a cart filled with fresh straw, its tongues open, blocked the drive. He methodically harnessed the single horse left in the stable, a horse as calm and affectionate as a dog. It was not so much a horse as an enormous blocky blond pony, with Iron Age bones and a black dorsal stripe running down his back from forelock to tail. He was at least sixteen hands high, with a neck so strong it spoiled his shape, his hooves the size of dinner plates. Beneath the cart lay the parents of the litter, one dead, the other terribly aged. The mother had passed away that morning, her purple breasts exploding with mastitis, swollen white tongue clenched between her teeth. Next to her lay the sire, haunches twisted with arthritis, goatee and forepaws graying, his golden eyes clouded with cataracts.

  Iulus moved deliberately but without distraction through the sad scene. He located some peasant Feastday costumery, though they were hardly actual peasant clothes, for they were beautifully made, never-worn attic costumes out of a comic opera, with velveteen capes, horn buttons, crocheted sleeves, and patent leather boots draped loose about the ankle, their only camouflage being the absurd distance they put us from the present grisly proceedings. They were, in fact, costumes from the pageant collection of the royal family, who during summer vacations near Semper Vero liked to dress as peasants and live “the simple life.” It was the only uniform Iulus could think of that would not compromise us with some faction in Cannonia, where seven different wars now raged. And I realized for the first time that he meant to accompany me out.

  Iulus packed up the crown in a rucksack using great piles of manuscript for wadding. Then he deliberately filled a plaid valise with files, a Gladstone with correspondence, and a velvet ladies’ hat box with the plates of the Cannonian currency and the kennel studbook. He took particular care with a hand-tooled leather box with a raised monogram, Z. Then he picked up each of the nine pups under their front legs, and bussing them on the nose, buried them in the cart of straw. We mounted up on the narrow wooden seat, where I was happy to ride shotgun, and when he lay a gentle bootheel on the animal’s rump, the pony immediately broke into an electrifying tolta—faster than a walk, gentler than a trot.

  As the cart creaked away, leaving the old sire exposed, like the great Old One, mauled by the young, who bleeding away sires a thousand sons. Picking up his ears and raising his still massive chest, he passed a curdling glance in our direction. His haunches quivered as if to follow us, but he soon thought better of it, and as the cart spewed gravel in its wake, turned his head away as if content with our receding echo. We set off into a pewter Cannonian mid-morning, green turds spinning out of the blond horse, and I felt the double melancholy of not only leaving a place to which I might never return, but of leaving a place that I was not sure existed. I turned for a final glance of Semper Vero. Across a bold curve of the Mze, a filmy veil of fog was rolling down the mountain spurs, and from the central turret of the manor, a single cloud pennon streamed. Then the translucent clouds deepened and darkened, and swiftly, almost instantaneously, at high noon, the light failed. In the dying afterglow, the country stretched into the nothingness beyond. Oh, how this soldier-boy wanted something different to belong to!

  We rode in abrupt and arbitrary transition, just as in popular books, forded the shallow Its easily, and were gradually joined on either flank by solemn corteges of Astingi, winding across the blackened fields of no-man’s-land, to take shelter with us on the far side of the river. Their movement had none of the hallmarks of an advance or retreat. No weapons, insignias, or standards were on display. Legless veterans were carried on the shoulders of others. The men in their raspberry overcoats or menacing black felt cloaks, whips looped about their waists, rode in a mute assembly about the wagons of women and children, their great wheeled kettles and mobile hookahs in a fluid organization which required not a single verbal order. It was less an army than a biological force, simply crossing yet another river, another journey from nowhere to nowhere; for they had already forded the Mze twice upstream, in order to ford it again. The Astingi were laconic and expressionless, without so much as a backwards glance at their homelands. In their easy ancient resignation, they seemed neither warriors nor victims. Their very posture, their impressive silence, seemed only to indicate that entering history at its “cutting edge” was for them the most boring place to be.

  Late in the day, beneath a flotilla of barrage balloons, we could make out the desultory massing of American supplies in the oxbow of the river. Brown Studebaker trucks scurried like she-bears as far as the eye could see. A PX was already going up, and next to the stockade with its California-style barracks for displaced persons, I could make out the outlines of a swimming pool and athletic fields. The Cannonian dusk would soon be filled with flyballs, as America mounted her exhilarating project to prove history wrong.

  From the meadow bank, the Astingi peered from their ponies across the tawny river. On the far side, a group of sullen, drunken GIs stripped to the waist were skipping stones (a fact which seemed to startle even my impassive guide), and when a lanky left-hander skipped a pebble some twenty times across the whiskey-colored water, the Astingi vanguard scattered as if they had seen a ghost. Iulus stopped the cart and dismounted, studying the far bank in his binoculars. Then he turned his back and gestured to the lead horseman returning from the river, who seemed to recognize him despite the costumery. He galloped up and they had a brief discussion, speaking a language unlike any I had heard, lyrical but agglutinative, as if every word were a verb, a dactylic canter where each initial syllable set off a platoon of vowels which rushed away like birds after a gunshot, a basso continuo turning every A to O, every O to U, and every U to zero.

  The Astingi leader regrouped his advance guard and followed Iulus down to the muddy embankment. My guide stared at the water for some time; then with a brisk but casual motion, he suddenly bent down and caught a trout in his bare hands. When he held it up, the huge half-naked adolescents on the far bank stopped laughing, just as the Astingi troop began. And then as Iulus turned round, putting the fish in a fold of his loose boot, the Astingi began to ford the river with renewed confidence, their faith in superior reflexes restored. They refused to use the bridge, their ponies negotiating the eddies so effortlessly one could not tell if they were actually walking or swimming.

  We ourselves crossed the pontoon bridge lodged with the bloated carcasses of many horses and farm animals. I showed the bored MPs my papers, and they waved us into the camp, which we entered as if from another century, another planet, as if from some B-grade movie—two Kulaks in their Sunday best, a horsedrawn hayrick with its smuggled riches—the oldest trick in the book—and one, as it turned out, that was being replicated a thousand times a day along the stopline, each American policeman more credulous or indifferent than the last, as murderers, spies, and thugs by the score took shelter amongst the people who called Heaven their home. We were billeted at the rear of the camp
which now stretched across two double oxbows of the Mze. The back office had finally caught up with our advance and was busily collecting information while denying rumors of a last great push to destroy the Soviets in their tracks, which naturally had elicited no great enthusiasm in the ranks. There was no longer any mention of Terra XX.

  A crowd of soldiers had already gathered about our cart, more curious about the single mechanical conveyance to survive their artillery barrage intact than our fey costumery, cautiously patting the prehistoric horse who gently nipped back, and cooing like a bunch of schoolgirls over the litter, which had now poked their heads from the straw, ears erect and rumps awhirr. Iulus decided then and there to break up the litter, for they were in that twelfth week of canine life in which the bonding to humans is best transferred.

  There was no shortage of volunteers or tears. The new owners allowed their dogtags and serial numbers to be pressed into candlewax seals, and eagerly if laboriously wrote out their home addresses on the enormous violet pages of the leatherbound pedigree book. Then after looking them up and down, as if to match the aristochiens to the acned adolescents who whooped about him, Iulus insisted that they form in ranks while he presented the pups, while reading out their German call names: “Stekel! Federn! Kahane! Silberer! Honegger! Kremzir! Tausker! Schreber! Schrotter!” until he was sure that the new owners could at least half-pronounce them.

  “To the victors go the spoils, as they say,” he concluded in suddenly perfect uninflected English, “but don’t forget, gentlemen, I will be watching you . . . forever.” The new owners were giggling, but they seemed to recognize his authority even though his outlandish garb was by this time literally falling to pieces. Then he dismissed them with cheerful wave of a hand, and our boys ran off inattentively, the pups frolicking at their heels, and I knew from that day on that my allegiances would grow ever more complicated. And frankly, I was just a bit ashamed of my disguise.