In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  The Professor’s heart had dropped when they leapt, fearing the worst, and now it did again as their clear-veined legs and drawn-in haunches seemed to promise more than virile virtue, bringing back the awe and helplessness he had felt at the Cossack-like charge of the Astingi boy on his pony.

  The animal’s bodies lurched on a centrifugal plane like dervishes, and as they neared us, rather than stopping, they took on the masters (Rubato attending the Hauptzuchtwart, Nimbus the stranger) with a sudden upward lunge, snapping at the men’s faces as if to bite their noses off. The Professor had already recoiled, but as the jaws of Nimbus passed by his head, she planted a floating air-kiss on his lips, half-tenderly, half-mischievously, beslobbering his defensive, outthrust arm. Then began the dance of welcome and salutation—prodigious waggings of hindquarters, violent tugs of muscles, rapid tramplings, daring vaults, annular contractions, far-flung leaps, and the indubitable claw-flamenco.

  Their cut tails were vibrating to quick-time, their rosy riffled mouths exposed. Then Father quietly spoke their favorite words—“Ru-ba-to, Nimbus”—and with a single leap they were at his side, shoulder blades against his shinbones like statues, each with a white whorl on its chest. Father put them in a double-harness, and without another word we set off for the forest where the juiciest ferns grow thick and the deer congregate to escape the midday heat. The birds stopped singing.

  Our forests were not the true trackless type, the only true remnants of which exist in northern Russia and northmost America, but in fact were leafy islands cut from fields to shield the springs and water sources. Before the Great War you could move a thousand kilometers east and rarely be a hundred yards from drinking water, and by carefully picking its portages across the sterile fields, a full column of horsemen could remain in shade for days at a time. The emphasis had always been to extract game from the brutal and never bucolic forms of agriculture, circumventing those bound to the garner of the land—a never-ending battle to wrest trees from the peasant’s poaching axe and the magnate’s long saw.

  “Ah, to live in harmony with the land,” the Professor let slip as he picked his way about the cowpats.

  “Stand for a day with a shepherd dog, my friend,” Felix riposted, “and we shall see what becomes of your mind. You could turn all the Germanies into a gymnasium and not restore it. For a landscape to have grandeur, it must have a bit of nonsense.”

  Then he discoursed on why nature is anything but natural:

  “One must work incessantly so that the landscape is neither diminished nor allowed to revert to uncontrolled growth. A constructive edge which is not impenetrable but in which one can hide takes many men to create, many lifetimes, many tricks and sacrifices, so that you can get close to a bird who has survived all history with the latecomer, the dog, who it took eight thousand years to train just to eat out of his own dish.”

  Father had this theory, as far as I know unrefuted, that every nation takes the structure of its mind from the nature of its forest, whether it be the diagonal rows of the French bocage and its filtered crystalline light, making the informal formal; the dense darkness of the Teuton wood, where the trees die top down and the canopy seems made of gnarled roots; the ever-correct English copses, memorial to the vanished forest of thieves and adventurers; or the single druidical cypress worshiped by Mediterraneans—as well as those ancient civilizations where the austerity of intellect is apparently the result of having no trees at all, but only unaesthetical shrubbery, not to speak of jungles where rarity is homogeneity; the Russian taiga of birch, pine, and rowan whose inwardness is so palpable and passive; and finally the American backwoods, the richest botanically but the most slovenly kept, its most prominent feature stumps, which exist chiefly to hide broken, discarded toys—toys, they say, made of everything but wood.

  The woods in our part of the world corresponded well to the human state for which they were intended: islands of secrecy, preserved from the snip, snip, snip of agricultural routine. Not even centuries of war could destroy these covens, though one man within his lifetime, in the interest of a few handfuls of grain or kindling, could do more damage than the most violent of autocratic contests. And the Professor, because he knew that animals returned to die there, misunderstood these patches of woods as dark places inhabited by goblins and other terrible forces, whereas in reality, as Father patiently explained, they were full of disappointments and surprises, but not to be feared, because men don’t die there.

  “We die out in the open,” he murmured as if in a trance, “when we forsake cover, out in the plain geometry of our own devising, making those banal rows of sweet little pods just like a cemetery. When the earth is pulverized and floats away with the rain and the green lines of mesmeric shoots appear, that’s when men must take cover, for it is in the spring when he begins to hallucinate at his own handiwork and builds his grave of vegetables.” It was the fields, not the woods, where the human experiment was out of control, and that was the delicate point he was prepared to enforce that day.

  When rhetorically upstaged, the Professor would often opt for a kind of radical response, in this case arguing that hunting was an outdated ritual to appease one’s vanity, an attempt to reconnect “bourgeois thinking” with its nobler antecedents, and “a stupid contest to determine who was the manliest man in all Klavierland.” But Felix disarmed him with selective candor.

  “What you say is true enough,” he said, “yet ninety-nine percent of our existence has been spent doing just that. I do not pretend to live in harmony with the land; the point is to distance oneself gradually from it, to make it an object of curiosity and pleasure. It’s woods alone that are worth hoodwinking for, my dear Hebraist; nevertheless, we take your point. And now, if you will, attend to mine.”

  The day was bright for my father’s display, as always prodigal but without fanfare. Rubato and Nimbus were released but made not the slightest lunge as the leash was uncoupled. They followed him two meters off each of his heels, watching the telltale arch of his booted foot, trading for the time being their poor eyes for his superior vantage, height, and peripheral vision. Climbing the embankment of a drainage ditch, the Professor already panting, we appeared on a stubbled rise and overlooked a field of wheat bordered at its furthest reach by what seemed an incommensurably dense line of forest. It was mostly ash, if a name tells you anything, a crippled bit of nature with billows of vegetation cascading about gnarled boles, a profusion of wild vines which reached to the very top of the trees and turned black in the winter, hard as barbed wire.

  Father’s right heel raised slightly, the precondition for firing, though he carried no gun—all he had to do was show the dogs the key to the gun cabinet for them to know the direction of the day. When his heel reached half an inch off the ground, Rubato and Nimbus dropped to their bellies, arched their necks, and cocked their heads ever so slightly in order to peer calmly around his calves. The Professor’s eyes had a hint of gray awe. My father spoke slowly, cradling his imaginary, redundant gun:

  “This is the opposite of suggestion, but an exercise in cooperation, reinforcing our worst senses with the best of others. The point is to define what is in reach and beyond reach, and gradually, with luck, to push back the confines of the inaccessible. That’s the part of the story which is always missed.”

  As he spoke, he bent slightly at the knees, and with a single wave of his hand, the dogs sprang up and plunged in tandem into the sea of green wheat.

  “As pure athletes they are the best that ever lived,” he went on. “They lack some of the nostalgic virtues, perhaps, but no one ever moved with such alacrity.”

  Now their noses were my father’s eyes. The Chetvorah knifed through the grain at full speed, his eyes following their skulls. The vast field for them became a simple frame which they divided into quadrants, galloping across each other’s black wakes in the green ocean, turning figure-eights like torpedo boats. Every few moments they leapt straight up to check their bearings, and while suspended in midai
r, with a slight coy turning of their heads caught the angle of my father’s hands, which cast them out further along vectors of his composing. He disdained the human voice and all the apparatus of verbs, horns, whistles, and thunder-clubs, and in this way, without a mote of wasted energy, mapped the sea of grass until the Chetvorah had fully quartered it, drinking everything in.

  The Professor watched this, squinted, bunching his shoulders, and let out a long sigh as the dogs reached the forest line without putting up a single bird. Then, wheeling in circles of disappointment, their purpose waning, they began to work their way back to us in desuetude.

  “Birds don’t eat lunch,” Father said by way of explanation, “but deer do,” and then, shaping his hands into a great parentheses, framed the final scene for the Professor. “Watch this well and with respect.”

  His hands flicked out, all ten fingers, and the dogs, caught short, turned volte face and began to work the forest edge, though one could sense the momentum had been broken, a few of the invisible threads between us snapped by the stress of an elegant search gone unrewarded. An element of hesitation, even boredom, was apparent in their gait even to an untrained observer. Nevertheless they kept working the edge in tandem, throwing up divots of earth in their indignation, and then their perfect figure-eights began to oscillate as one of them—Rubato, I thought—veered off at a tangent, ears flapping, in the kind of heavy, jazzy canter of a horse broken from its traces, or a duck breaking formation with a few pellets in its wing. With one ear carelessly turned inside out, he loped obliquely, hindlegs moving somewhat to the side, as some tremendous emotion began to seize him. Every nerve taut, one foreleg and one hindleg paused in the air, he peered with cocked head into the hollows as the flaps of his erected ears fell forward on both eyes. Nimbus backed him with fine deliberation, her bobbed tail waving furiously, both drunk with their own identity. Rubato wobbled left and right, then started, which jerked his head in rash recoil against his chest and in recovering almost tore his head from his shoulders. The spore of the deer had floated from the forest and dropped like a regimental flag before them.

  “Now there is only one chance left, very small,” Father whispered, still holding his cupped and inverted palms before the Professor’s glistening face. “We will see if Rubato has it in him to self-correct.”

  Nimbus was still locked in the semblance of a pattern, wheeling through the conflicting signals, walking the edge, and still vaguely aware that my father’s hands could reach her. But then with a shudder she broke off, not to the deer—a furtive stag with a broken rack and yellowish-white scut which had just broken from the thicket—but to her runaway brother’s trail. The dogs accelerated now faster than ever, a breakneck berserker pace, and disappeared into the forest, galloping with teeth set and howling inwardly.

  The parentheses of my father’s hands closed, as if to wring the last, long, soft note out. The view became bright and empty, the fields desolate.

  “They’re demons now,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Their sordid history has overtaken them.”

  “Call them!” the Professor cried out, wringing his hands. It was like the cry of a woman who has been told her husband is dead. “Call them back!”

  Father called out their names in a high, clear voice, more to comfort his friend than anything. Then he blew on the horn of bone and finally the steel whistle, an ear-splitting military pitch of the last resort, though he knew better. On the overgrazed hill beyond the forest, we could make out the stag lumbering up the slope, pausing every now and then to aim a labored hindquarter kick. And behind him, losing ground like their names, the two spittle-sucking stumblebums in blind pursuit. They disappeared into the hooded Cannonian landscape of uncomprehending beasts and unskillful hunters.

  “They’re too far to hear,” the Professor said agonizingly.

  “Oh, they hear all right,” my father said, “but it’s just one voice among others now.”

  The Professor turned tearfully. “Nothing to be done?”

  “Absolutely nothing. It’s not that they have forgotten exactly. They are simply beyond their own faculties. Now we can only pray the stag does not run them into wire, or that some besotted shepherd does not shoot them. And when they come back down the road in a few days, full of burrs, their tongues hanging out like blood sausage, you will notice that your love and concern has been turned to an urge to punish. No, they will not look you in the eye. They will not even come to the house. They will go and beg to be let into the kennel. Remember the scene, Herr Doktor, not the individuals.”

  “If we had accompanied them,” the Professor broke out accusatorially, “this would not have happened.”

  “Precisely,” my father said calmly and politely. “They reached the end of the field, and seeing themselves in the mirror, like children, they chose to look behind it. But don’t forget, dear friend, just before, the pride of our cooperation! And for all that, remember the field before the forest, before they broke the civilzonnen, where the voluntary reigns. It is almost exactly eighty meters long, sixty wide, and one inch deep, and in my lifetime I have enlarged it by twenty percent! As things get beyond that, sir, we are only custodians. There is no return on capital.” The double harness hung like a gallows rope in his hands. “It’s time for a little lunch, and a bit of oblivion,” he announced without emotion.

  As the Professor followed Father into the White Wings, Black Dog, he noted a small, hand-painted sign above the door.

  YOU ARE APPROACHING EARTH’S CENTER

  IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IT

  JUST ENTER

  The jolly, almost-too-rosy serving girl waved them back to The Brainery with a butter knife. While all their fellow diners were male, the room itself had an eternally feminine quality. Disdainful of mere prettiness, the colors were sweetly mysterious shades of pale yellow, which unfolded rather than pleased the eye, and the floating draperies blurred the precise lines of the room with profound sensuality. Just as they were seated in a green booth with curtains, a platter of tiny steaming birds, a woodcock fricassee, was brought to the table.

  “Served only one week a year,” Father announced with a wink. “If a mouflon is shot in the mountains of Vop, it is brought here; if a fine salmon is hauled from the Augesee, it is packed in ice and brought here; if an especially fine jar of sheep’s milk cheese should appear in Chere Muchore, it is also brought here.”

  Then the Professor was amazed to see his host lift up the tablecloth, and placing the platter in front of him, drape the cloth over his head and dish, making a tent so as to fully inhale their woodfern aroma. He did not reappear for fully ten minutes.

  While Father was thus preoccupied, the Professor perused the menu, at the top of which was only the motto “Hic Carnem Comedemius.” (“We are not vegetarians here.”) Like a true dog’s dinner, it was divided not into courses or even genres: minced chick soup, larks in crumbles, sandpipers in gondolas, fish sausages, blancmange fritters, quince stew with scarlet jelly, griddlecakes with nut paste and Spanish wine. Marzipan love-flakes, macaroon trifle, refreshing fennel and almond essences, maraschino ices. Cockscombs in pagodas and champagne, turkeys daubed with stewed grapes, stuffed pike and river birds garnished with oysters. Aspic of carp with frog dumplings, calves’ ears stuffed with lamb gizzards, grilled peach stew with aniseed, collapsed yearling boar with creamed eggplant and pomegranate molasses. Oxtongue and asparagus ragout, parboiled artichoke bottoms piled with pounded duck livers. Young rabbits with anchovies, minute cold boned thrushes, salad of oranges, herbs, olives, and marigold petals. Braised doe-shanks glazed with sumac and hazelnuts, thrush pate with cardamom fritters, sheeps’ tongues in curled papers, boiled beef skirts rubbed with saltpeter and stuffed with snipe. Roe tarts with shrimps and partridges in their own juice, chilled eels in dill frockcoats, perch and baby quail patties, bass aghast in green garlic. Marrow fried in crumbs, minced pigeon in cream, pig trotters in milk, marshfed veal rubbed with mint and wild thyme in four stocks, and as a single concess
ion to the French, an omelette au joli coeur.

  At the bottom was an asterisked dish (“For guaranteed success in courting fair ladies”): sliced bear’s paw atop pork filet stuffed with chicken liver and rolled in bacon slices, garnished with truffles, onion rings, and pickles.

  The Professor was about to order this intriguing dish, but once the woodcock had disappeared, the courses were simply brought without order, timing, or explanation. He had little idea what the dishes were until each new joy was consumed; then he could make out various layers, fragrances of unusual clarity superimposed on one another like a fugue, which made him want to live forever. Nor could he discern the various wines which were automatically poured, as the wine list was not only in an unknown language but an alphabet he had never seen. At one point he glanced up to the only art in the room, an embroidered pennant which announced:

  THE USE OF BOTTLED ESSENCES FOR

  SEASONING IS FORBIDDEN AND WILL

  LEAD TO INSTANT DISMISSAL.

  The White Wings, Black Dog had a calculated double ambience in its strategy for exercising goût. The front rooms gave off to a courtyard hidden from the street where men and women sat whispering at tiny pearwood tables large enough for only a drink and an ashtray. Further inside were a series of pine booths arranged at angles to an enormous walk-in fireplace, partially lit even in August and hung with various kettles of stew from which one could serve oneself with a large, enameled tin plate. Occasionally a serving girl would slip out the back door with a huge knife, and after an incredible series of shrieks and squeals, something spitted and juicy would be turning over coals where just five minutes before a pot of chrysanthemums sat.