In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  Gubik concluded his obmutescent soliloquy, took a long drink of soda water, and waved his hand as if brushing away a fly. The group around the fire fell silent.

  “That’s all?” the Professor insisted, flabbergasted. “I mean, it’s not exactly Goethe.”

  Gubik crossed his arms and said nothing more.

  “They changed their minds,” the Professor insisted. “It’s the beginning of civilization you’re describing. They saw their error.”

  “Yes,” said Gubik, smiling with impromptu gravitas. “But it was too late.”

  “Ah, yes,” Father echoed absently. “Too late. Right from the beginning.”

  “And no one came to their aid?” the Professor said.

  “No one,” Gubik said emphatically through a thin smile. “Dogmeat! The aurochs laughed so hard milk came out their noses.”

  “And the star, the girl who changed into a star,” the Professor whined. “What was the name of the star?”

  Gubik shook his head slowly. “Just one of the stars,” he said laconically.

  “Then there’s no lesson at all,” the Professor said curtly. “It’s not very charming. I mean it rather dribbles out, don’t you think? You don’t make any connections!”

  Gubik licked the rim of his bowl. “Thus far and no further.”

  “There are, Doctor, you must admit, some pertinent if pessimistic observations,” Father broke in, as always protective of Gubik. The Professor was growing slightly apoplectic.

  “Then what, may I ask,” said the Professor, now at the far side of exasperation, “is this story of injustice called?”

  Our Astingi Homer squinted and looked up into the sky.

  “‘The Dog in the Manger,’” he stammered. “There are probably better stories.” Then he rolled over and covered himself in sheepskin, and soon we were all asleep, save the Professor and Catspaw, who, with the help of an astronomical atlas, were scanning the heavens for the star of Marea.

  “So full of holes, so flat,” the Professor was moaning, “no respect for either verisimilitude or illusion, and yet,” he pounded a fist into the flat of his hand, “everyone is entranced.”

  “Strange how the ancient bards were so unobservant of nature,” Catspaw said consolingly. “Virgil didn’t know the Pleiades from Pisces, or whether the moon was rising or setting.” And then he uncorked the plum brandy as the Professor produced two Trabuko cigars.

  The two men leaned against the wagon wheel, alternating puffs and swigs, until the phosphorescent constellations doubled. And though he had the weaker eyes of the two, it was the Professor who first spied the star sitting directly upon the Eastern horizon, and laid a hand upon Catspaw’s thigh. Catspaw squinted at the low blushed light for some time.

  “A shepherd’s fire,” he dismissed it as, and returned to his oral pleasures in a doze. But ten minutes later, the Professor again squeezed his leg.

  “It’s getting brighter.”

  Catspaw took another look, and with surprising agility climbed into the wagon bed. He emerged with an old-fashioned, long-barreled American squirrel rifle and a pair of Zeiss binoculars.

  “In all my years in the Marches,” he said, “I have never seen a shepherd moving toward you.” He adjusted the glasses, closing one eye, but could make out nothing but a faint glare, perhaps six miles off. Concluding this was no heavenly body, and that the odds of something benign approaching you in the Marches at three o’clock in the morning were nil, he did not wake his Master, but checked the tether ropes of the horses and oxen in case he had to fire the eardrum-shattering rifle. Resting the weapon on the iron siding of the wagon, he brought the long barrel to bear on the flickering light.

  The Professor inquired as to what he should do.

  “Mind the dogs,” Catspaw said only, as he stuffed his ears with moss. He felt underwater in this new alertness, as vivid remembrances sprang forth: the schoolmaster putting a thermometer in his mouth in a musty classroom, his first fall from a horse, a village church burning down, a corridor of lime trees, his mother’s freckled arm encircling his neck, his father’s drooping lower lip after his stroke . . . and then he was aware of an intoxicating and unfamiliar perfume—conifers, acacia, lupines? No, none of those, but some combination of human, animal, and herbs. He was about to fire when he took one last look through the glasses. It was Ainoha at furious gallop on a sweat-streaked Moccus, carrying a torch and rising in the stirrups German-style, led by old Sirius, still our best tracker. Her knees were bare, and her flowing skirts were kirtled up about her waist.

  As the dazed sleepers roused themselves in confused welcome, Moccus snorted through his vibrating nostrils, then stamped about, foam dripping from his teeth. His musculature seemed hammered metal, his bulging eyes like stone. All the animals, even the oxen, were respectful of his entrance.

  Ainoha, just come from a dinner party, was attired in a white empire dress of astonishing boldness, its transparent white muslin leaving her bosom bare. She rode barefoot on a tight pea-yellow English saddle, and rather than a crop, an ivory fan pierced with emeralds hung from the wrist of her long white gloves. She was paler than usual, a trace of childlike obstinacy below her regal coiffure.

  Father, uncharacteristically dumbstruck, reached up to swing her down from the saddle. But she simply handed him a violet telegram, like a good adjutant. It had been delivered during dinner by a particularly officious but weary messenger. As it was in Russian, she couldn’t decipher it, and thought it urgent to get it to Father. Messages from the East, infrequent as they were, generally were of momentous importance, and she knew his trips into the Marches had a way of stretching into weeks. Father kissed her hand as he tore open the envelope. But it was not even from Petersburg, and far more startling, was addressed to Master Seth Sylvius Gubik. It was an invitation from the rector of the Moscow Conservatory for a scholarship audition. A second-class rail ticket would be awaiting him at the Chorgo Station to be claimed within a fortnight. Father began to translate the telegram for Gubik, but the boy snatched it from his hand, saying, “I can make out Cyrillic.” Then he read it aloud to the astounded manège gathered in the Marches, opening his bloodless mouth in a terrible smile, revealing carious chipped teeth, his gold fillings sparkling in the firelight.

  This harmless missive quite out of the blue, which no one, even Gubik, it seemed, had any inkling of, precipitated the most perfunctory conversation and threw the routines of encampment into disarray. Even the sunrise seemed reluctant and uncoordinated. After sour bread and burned coffee it was decided that the family should return at once to Semper Vero, and it fell to me to accompany the Professor back to the border, and if no Skopje were available, thence to Sare—taking care not to run the horses home.

  I had always been instructed not to engage the Professor in conversation unless he initiated it, so that he might have the opportunity to reflect upon the object lessons of the day. He rarely said a word to me in those days, but that was partially due to the fact that the actual landscape, which theretofore had only been a backdrop in the press of canine lore or literary analogy, was gradually becoming visible, even startling to him. I realized that this was the first time he had experienced the landscape of Klavier without a dog in it.

  The ancients saw the Marchlands as a “nightland,” not properly sea or air, but somehow unromantically concocted from those elements. Their suspension was not easy to walk on, and though well-watered, impossible to navigate by sail, oar, or boathook—only during shallow floods caused by high winds were they accessible. Their only architectural feature were lighthouses, built by the Astingi apparently out of contrariness—for why should only the sea have lighthouses?—though no one could recall seeing one lit. The plain was technically not swamp, steppe, or desert, but, commingling the three, an anomaly of neither volcanic nor oceanic origin, never forested, where no shrub or tree larger than a man would grow. Indeed, nothing taller than a man could exist there; even the fallow deer and wild ponies were of shoulder-height, along wi
th darting, bite-size birds, tiny fingernail butterflies, and dwarf scooting rabbits no bigger than a rat—though a dozen skewered on a spit over an open fire could be the high point of a lifetime. The herds of diminutive and nonthreatening ostriches, llamas, and camels introduced by Grandfather Priam in his Noah phase thrived in the Marchia; a place, in short, where human scale was finally oppressive and where, like heaven, visitors invariably remarked upon the shortness of the grass. This no-man’s-land had been subdivided into lots in the seventeenth century on the premise that the velocity of the trade route would create another boomtown. Yet for three hundred years no one had bought so much as a sliver. One could not project a plan upon it. Nor could one imagine improvements upon it, any more than divine its history. It was the lord’s own subdivision, the infrastructure intact, your basic shrubbery in a grid of lots and no demand. For a man on the run there was no place to hide, for a man with a plan there was no one to take him up on it. It was a province of the utmost idleness and carelessness, where procreation itself was initiated by a slight nervousness or boredom. Even the railway had skirted the area, preferring through some combination of engineering perversity and convict labor to be built upon cedar pilings.

  Always lush with grass and underlain by an enormous aquifer just under the surface, not so much as a trickle of a stream crossed the Marches. Yet water was everywhere, just beneath a network of roofless limestone and coral caverns studded with opals, complicated as a neuron. It had neither hillock nor true swamp, forest copse or declivity of any kind, and for that matter, not even a single rock for miles. The terrain absorbed our common violent storms effortlessly, yet its huge filter was so packed with moisture it would not burn, and thus was abandoned reluctantly even by the prehistorical personality.

  Unlike its sister steppe, its soil would grow anything you put into it with absolutely no care, but never at a rate of growth acceptable to modern agriculture. If ploughed it would become cloddy and slick; to fertilizer it was vaguely indifferent. The peculiar lime-green grass was so elastic that it defied the scythe and clogged the mechanical hayrack. It produced no minable minerals, yet the soil was so fully nutrient that it was toxic to domesticated animals. Entire herds perished, falling over with a collective sigh in a heap, poisoned systemically by a sudden overdose of trace elements. Wildlife, however, continued to thrive. It supported more species than any other part of Europe, as their reduced size was disdained by royal hunting parties. Spared the atrocities of agriculture as well as the euphemistic and even more destructive “hunting and gathering,” it was a place to picnic and loll, and to carry out one’s little experiment; and above all to sharpen one’s eye. It had its own ecological integrity, for the Astingi believed that whatever or whoever you killed in the Marches was doing someone else a favor.

  In our family album there were photos of ladies in sailor suits and parasols stooping for an extinct wildflower in the Marches; aunts masquerading as young girls with pigtails and flowered aprons seated in a horizonless rectangle of air, a clutch of newborn goslings in their laps; a mysterious woman in a striped double-breasted suit and straw hat, standing with her easel in the scrub with no subject it seemed, conveying only the aura of a stylish woman with time on her hands. There were photos of Grandfather standing in a black fedora and velvet cape, his back always turned to the camera. Every scene with him was exactly two-thirds sky, flecked with enormous glandular cumulus, and one-third muddy ground. A hazy uneven horizon implied the fluvial course of a river in the distance, but was in fact only the road to the ferry, a seam of top-heavy poplars and goiterlike topiary shaped by the absence of any care. My caped grandfather never looked out to the horizon, but always gazed toward the ground, at the faint trace of an old wagon wheel rut, which, creasing the strange wide-bladed grass, soon disappeared from sight. It was kind of a farmer’s field, or rather a rough sketch of one, as if a full crop of sweetgrass had been pulled from some edenic meadow, transported to this plain, and carelessly transplanted in irregular tufts, dried and scrofulous.

  The main feature of the Marchia, besides the itsy-bitsy game, were the wells, a veritable forest constructed of large locust trees lugged from the foothills and topped so that only the main fork remained. After the trunk was wedged in the sod, a hickory log exactly three times the length of the forked tree was laid at the fulcrum, creating a natural lever. The hickory log had been wrapped in burlap and soaked in hot lard at its friction point, and a weight, if possible a Roman millstone, was then lashed to the shorter end for ballast. At the lifting end of the pole a leather thong was noosed and attached to a brass swivel, and from there a rope fell spiraling upon the ground. Only then, where the noose dropped, was the actual well-digging begun, dirt being slung around in great arcs by the diggers, and in no time at all, one meter at the most, the shallow aquifer was exposed, the mud taking on a silken, vulvaic sheen. Then a box of oaken slats was built to keep the bubbling gloss pure from grazing game. Once this reservoir filled, a wooden bucket was attached to the rope, and a good fellow might leap up and grasp the pole just ahead of the stone, and hanging there, his arms clasped about the hickory lever, observe the log rise slowly as a bucket of sweetish, slightly carbolic water would be hauled from the Marchlands—an elemental brew.

  The strange thing about these wells was that no man or animal really had need of them. No one had ever gone thirsty in that country, and of the thousands of wells erected on that plain I sincerely doubt if more than a handful ever swung a drink upward to anyone.

  Eventually, the “Y” of the locusts sprouted new limbs and shoots, the pivotal architecture of the redundant pump slowly refashioning itself back into a tree. On the hickory fulcrums the bark shredded and fell off, the treegut glistening and hardening to a coarse gray like wet stone. And not a few were carved, whether by the horns of rutting animals or the steel of idle men, it is difficult to say.

  In the spring, great irregular seepage pools formed about the rectangular boxes, so that the lifting mechanism was reflected in them, and yet they never even earned a proper noun. There was no name for them. “You know, the ----!” the Astingi would say with a smile and a shrug, holding up two fingers, one less than their usual salute.

  Lopsided crosses, shattered capitals, polylifts, inadvertent art, machinery not born of a function but in search of one—it was this woodland of unmanned, unnamed drooping poles, this no-man’s land of pointless ionic hydraulics and arrested pumping, this forest of levers with its unsettling religious quality, that the Professor had to traverse to turn homeward, until at the northern border of the Mze the fields suddenly began to whimper and submit to the ambience of dovecotes and lighthouses, as prettiness broke out.

  We proceeded with impeded canter and the jingling of curb chains toward the ferry landing. Although the Professor had been given the gentlest of the piebald mares, every time her hoof struck a stone it went directly to his heart. His hands had begun to hurt, and I gave him my riding gloves. He shifted to ride in the burdock beside the road, but I warned him to return to the roadway, as the prickly burrs would accumulate in the joint behind the hoof and cause infection. Finally, he found his seat, and the mare pointed her ears and settled into an affected, dance-like gait. On the ferry, pestered by midges, she became restless and kicked out her hindquarters. I made a low whistle, putting one hand upon the mare’s brain, and the other soothingly between her flank and the Professor’s knee, and she quieted down. On the far bank not a carriage was to be seen, so I suggested we proceed to Sare by the old military road.

  The periphery of the Marchlands was not without its history of bloody stalemates, the Marches themselves being too soft a terrain for a battle proper. Offering no vantage, no cover, and such fragility, only a single man with a good dog leading a good horse might traverse it and not sink into the hidden river. While the wars of the last century had made not a dent in the wildlife, the unburied dead routinely surfaced in the floods, skeletons with their helmets and boots intact, a perfect row of steel buttons betw
een the ribs. Even halberds, swords, spears, and cannonballs were occasionally belched up from furious geysers. This band of warring, serpentine rivers coiling back upon one another, where every property had a water view, was noted on the ancient maps as Inter Canum et Lupus. It was open country where the fool for love might gambol, and the loathed ex-lover might lick his wounds. And though many a flag had been hoisted on the horizon, no battle had actually been concluded on that ground. The monotony of the landscape was only superficial, for it was home to an enormous variety of species and held an equal variety of enormous, submerged hatreds. If no actual ruins were to be seen, traces of every form of failed social architecture had survived in a twilight where one might ponder the most astounding things. For between the dog and the wolf, as between their human versions, there are really only two stories—that of the wild being tamed, and the tame reverting to the wild.

  We passed through a toll gate at the military border. Constructed in a bad imitation of the wells, its crotch sank lower in the ground, and the lever forming the gate was fir, three times the length of the well standard, with a cargo net full of cannonballs for the counterweight. The fir was squared off and thinned with an ax down to the tip, where the rope, connected by a chain apparatus, fell not to water but to a cogwheel to haul the gate down. It took great strength to crank a gate, which is why they invariably remained open at forty-five degrees perpendicular, an angle high enough that the tallest hayrick might pass beneath. Once beneath a gate, hat in hand, passport in the other, the primitive leverage of the wells seemed benign, big check marks in the sky, as if you had accounted for all the inventory before you left and could now do business without anxiety.