In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  “Exactly what Marcus Aurelius thought upon this very spot, dear Doktor.”

  “On the edge of the ancient world, you choose to write about the only people without a history?”

  “They lost their written language some time ago,” Felix said softly without turning. “I aim to give it back to them before they depart.”

  “But surely this is a project that with . . . fresh capital . . . might best be finished in southern France, or even Italy.”

  “I moon not for your vie méditerranée,” Father said without edge. “Oxen and wainwrights could not drag me away from here. I appreciate you playing the fool the other day, but despite your ineffectual gallantry, you’re still not ready for a Chetvorah.”

  “Not ready,” the Professor said sarcastically, “or not deserving, Councilor?”

  “Ah, always the justiz business, eh, Herr Doktor?”

  The Professor let this pass with a superior glance, and Felix felt his self-control slipping away.

  “I find it passing strange, Herr Doktor, that of all the girls in the world, you would attach yourself to this, this brace of chowlets from the uncircumsized East.”

  The Professor was unperturbed. “That’s quite the point: the Prinzessin traces them back to the eleventh century BC. They are the true ancestors of the basic breed, migrated from the Arctic Circle. They joined us in our time of troubles, the glacial age, when hair was hair.”

  “I see that the Princess has been reading Popular Dogs,” Father enjoined. “But how far back must we go, Herr Doktor? Could we just for a moment climb out of prehistory and concentrate, say, on something more admissible? Their parentage, for example?”

  “Lun and Jofi,” the Professor announced, “are of the Tartoum line.” And he handed over the pedigree papers like a military messenger under artillery fire.

  “Tartoum?” Father interjected. “British stock!” Then, placing his pale hand on Professor’s shoulder, he made preparations for a long, soft soliloquy. “Let us go and do some lineage work,” and they passed directly across the library, now shaded by a huge tree of manuscript fluttering in the breeze. Felix offered nothing by way of hospitality, and the Professor’s usual martial walk became tentative. He suspected that he was not adventuring that day, but trespassing. The chows’ violence had released some unspeakable aura into the air. Father sat him down behind his desk as he scanned the dogs’ papers.

  “One shouldn’t make too much of this, but I can tell you now that these dogs will never get along. There are forces here, a jealousy say, that is well beyond our control, and you are going to have to choose between the two. But let’s defer that. You seem to forget that in this part of the world we have a certain sensitivity to visits from the East, and that your fondness for the Ice Age neglects the somewhat more contemporary fact that it was precisely these dogs, with their black tongues and stiff gait, who accompanied the Tartars on their raids. And so, for hereabouts, they are the veritable symbol of Asiatic carnage. I’m surprised that they weren’t shot right out of your carriage. If word got around, I could have my whole kennel poisoned. So I must ask you to remove . . . I forget their names—the girls—by darkfall, and to return without them.”

  The Professor accepted this with equanimity—indeed, he seemed to take pleasure in what Father told him. He simply said, “I need something, someone strong in my life.”

  Father pretended not to hear. He had already removed the drying manuscript pinned to the periodical rack where the issues of Dogdom for each year had been bound annually in blue cloth with leather spines. He matched the Prinzessin’s papers with the subsection on “Chow Life,” and found the lineage quickly, whereupon he broke into a devilish grin.

  “It seems, Professor, that what we have here is a hegemonic Anglo-American cross.”

  The Professor’s face fell.

  “And there seems another burden you must bear, my friend: the pater, Tartoum the Fifth. The chow breed became popular in England when Queen Victoria put one in her kennels. Tartoum won the show at the Crystal Exhibition despite biting the judge and his handler. He was owned by one Marchioness Hurtley, who, after centuries of random breeding, decided to fix, in a fit of Darwinism”—Felix spat this word—“the traits she most prized. In this case the project was to deangulate the hindquarters and perfect the perpetual scowl. She was trying for aristocratic aloofness, one must suspect; what she got was bitterness. She strengthened the back legs, no doubt, which is why we now have a leonine body upon pencil legs, like an old whore. In any event, Tartoum continued to win and bite—the more he won, the more he bit—and the English dealt with this in their usual manner, by changing ownership often, so that Tartoum accumulated as many masters as medals, bringing glory to a succession of not-so-old families—always in need of certification—who, having filled their trophy case with his ribbons, passed on his viciousness at a profit to one another. Tartoum did manage, randomly, to produce some notable dogs, mainly daughters: Blue Cobweb and Tam Wong Ton come to mind. I saw the latter drag a child on a sled once at Berlin.”

  This too did not perturb the Professor. His eyes were black as coal and his jaw was set in a particularly determined line.

  “Given this line of development, Councilor,” he said calmly, “what would you suggest in the way of reinforcement?”

  “It’s perhaps too late,” Father said, “but chows do not like to let go of things, and for some reason do not like to be touched around their hindquarters. The Tartars’ whip, perhaps? Without delay you should let them play with your hand in their mouth and touch them all about their privates. When you can insert a finger under their tongue without being hurt, and a finger in their anus without hurting them—well, that’s about as far as you can go with a chow.”

  The Professor nodded reflectively.

  “Of course, we only have half the story.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The American mother, sir, is Arrogant Melody Moonbeam! The credentials, if we can believe them, are impressive: a certificate at Westminster,” he read further, “yes, yes, this should interest you. It seems that the great preponderance of American chow exhibitors are doctors. Arrogant Melody is owned, but not handled, by a Dr. Herb Fagen of Staten Island, a proctologist, it seems.”

  The Professor’s hand felt inside his vest for a Trabuko.

  “And her parents are from the great state of California. Would you care to know their names? Here, write this down: “Sid and Maurey Mintz are the breeders in Sacramento, California. Sid is an oral surgeon, Maurey a ‘homemaker’”—what do you suppose that is? And the grandparents are here: Bring the Bacon, a four-time champion of Orange County, and Rabbinic Petticoat Lane. Curious names, no? These chow-minded folk.”

  The cigar was lit but there was no smoke; it was all inside the Doctor. Father gravely turned the pages.

  “And two littermates of Moonbeam have eight points toward their championships: Don Li Chowtime and Cotton Candy Chink. So it would seem that we have invigorated the inbred royal line with the hardy middle-class blood of the restless people of Aaron.”

  “Bourgeois,” the Professor snorted. And through the murmurous whispers of manuscript Father cocked one ear like a dozing dog who hears a distant gunshot. Perhaps he was trying to wiggle his ears, but there were no puptricks left in his repertoire. He fixed the Professor with an arctic gaze. He was cool, so cool it burnt.

  “You of all people should know,” he spoke with icy lucidity, each phrase like a scythe blade, and widening his eyes as if to take in all the room, “that we will always have need of a place outside the bourgeois and beyond capital.”

  The Professor made a small sheepish gesture. “You have an extraordinary ability to discompose a person,” but Felix again did not hear. He repeated his last words to himself as if dazed, then wandered over to another glass vitrine of artifacts and began to strip it of manuscript.

  Now, one kind word (or less harsh joke) from either one would have ended this confrontation, and concluded our tale on
a still tenuous but more appealing note. But the time had come for their favorite game, the game which spared no feelings, a game which could only be played spontaneously by two powerful men, each believing the one was incapable of hurting the other, a battle of the polymaths.

  It was in an exorbitant, hyperbolic mood that Father opened the vitrine and set out the two artifacts of the day: first, a female figure cut from lava, schematic and wide-buttocked, a goddess with elongated neck and stumps for arms, wearing a belt with discs on the pubis and each hip, the shoulders incised with meanders, chevrons, and semi-circles; and next, a veined, rosy, marble male member, half-hooded, with a single incision in its tip, and broken from its torso.

  “Of the goddess we know nothing,” Father said, “except that pieces like it are invariably found whole, the lack of a head and arms due to the indifference or crudity of the maker. Of the other, we know even less, except that both statues stood on the Via Ocampo in Rome, the goddess within the temple, the naked general without. Here, speak into the radio.” He picked up the pink penis of Marcus Aurelius from the table as if it were a tarot discard. “Put it in your mouth,” Father said slowly. The Professor gazed across at him quizzically.

  “Pretend you’re a horse and think of it as just another sort of snaffle,” Father continued in a rather uncharacteristic singsong. “Put it in your mouth and I’ll tell you a story, better than that little bastard, Gubik. It’s called ‘The Bourgeois and the Barbarians.’”

  The Professor held the piece of marble between his fingers like a cigar.

  “You must be joking.”

  “Never more serious in my life. You’d be far better off with that in your mouth than those damn Trabukos. Saxa loquuntur! (Stones speak!)”

  The Professor knew he was being double-dared, and so, with rather too much exaggeration, replaced his cigar with the stone.

  “How is it?” Father asked.

  “Is kalt.”

  And with that, Father began to murmur about that admirable man, the last of the good emperors, who on the very spot where they had now taken their stand, had been the first to scan the Astingi across the Mze.

  “So, Marcus,” Father invoked his name, as if he were seated at the table, “that befuddled and permanently transitional figure, sent to an unattractive region to stem the tides of barbarism, only to end up theoretical and melancholy. The first real westerner, Marcus, weary of life, unable to praise an uneasy peace, denied a climactic victory, waiting for the retreat to sound, avoiding malice but never really sealing the borders, yet never quite overrun, and forgiving the avarice and treachery of those around him only because there was no adequate form of revenge. The first intellectual, Marcus, a man of good intentions who was nevertheless basically a humbug and a prig, a kind of schoolmaster silently condemning everyone, obsessed with self-perfection and the reiteration of moral platitudes, full of precepts and self-exhortations, addressing no one but himself, even though he is king, general, and scribe. In an Age of Hypochondria, he finds his audience distracted. He has a bad marriage and knows the most deplorable of his children will succeed him. He meditates, if that’s the word, not upon the empire, but upon death. The Mze is frozen solid, and one moonless night there is a cavalry battle on the frozen ice floes, the horses slipping and sliding amidst showers of sparks, the torches held by the horse handlers. Two mounted regiments clashing head on in a medium where every strategy and virtue is turned into a nightmare of pure chance. And after this, ignoring the most amusing thing that might befall a commander in all his campaigns, Marcus does not even count the bodies in the morning, but returns to his tent to be alone with his ‘diary,’ his nocturnal, where, after many a midnight lucubration, he submits his body to his mind, the only struggle being between the thinker and his thought—real pensées such as ‘Virtue is the only good,’ ‘Time is a torrent,’ and ‘Put down the bitter cucumber.’ And there in his tent, Marcus makes the astounding discovery that serenity is possible only when all things are external to you. While from across the Mze comes the taunt, as it comes still: ‘Fight Marcus! Get naked and fight!’”

  The Professor’s lips around the marble cigar had turned light blue. His eyes were closed.

  “Had he been more attentive to detail,” Father continued, knees pumping like an adolescent’s, “he would have noticed that when his soldiers stripped the bodies on the floes of the frozen river the next day, they found women among the dead, their heads and arms cut off, but clearly women in armor. When you find a woman in armor, the campaign is over, my friend, whatever the results of the battle. It’s time to turn around the elephants and go home.”

  The Professor popped the marble from his mouth, holding it between his first and second fingers.

  “Why is it, Councilor,” he rejoined, holding his own against the rhetorical onslaught, “that everyone these days thinks they’re a Herodotus or Thucydides?”

  But the narrative trance was not to be interrupted.

  “Ah, Marcus,” Father whispered across the table, gripping its edges with his hands, “Marcus, Marcus, Mar-cus!” He cupped his lips about his mouth and called across the table as if it were a river. “Marcus Aurelius . . . has a little penius,” he giggled. The Professor’s face had by now sunk into his beard.

  “I’m not at all sure,” he said gravely, “that as a general rule I would recommend listening to those shouts from across the river,” which of course is the most provocative thing he could have said.

  “No greater fear than to be named by those who have no name! And when someone hates you, Professor, one must approach their souls, penetrate inside, and see what sort of people they are! And to do that, one must give up notions of both literary and military fame. One must cross the arbitrary river which divides Cannonia Superiore from Cannonia Inferiore, enter the black room from the white chamber. To discover our people, Professor, when we were all Jews! There they sit watching across the ancient barrier of the Mze, so often violated and so often restored. Shall they sweep it away, shall they enter Europe by the Mze in a shower of faggots and arrows, so all Europe is a mangled stag? For across the river, they see what soothing relief it is to turn the personal into the intellectual.”

  The Professor absently took a puff on his surrogate cigar.

  At this point Father grew exasperated, and leaping to the south wall, tearing down more manuscript, drew down with a crack like a rifle shot a map which for the rest of the decade covered “The Scale of Being” and “The Tree of Life.” It didn’t appear to be a spontaneous gesture, but one he had been preparing for some time, with wide reading and a good deal of note-taking. From what I could judge through the closed doors where the dogs and I lay panting, our noses squashed against the keyholes, he’d been rehearsing even the cadences of his delivery, as he often did before his rare jury trials. He was about to give the master speculator himself a complicated history lesson, and hopefully reinvigorate their conspiracy to unite Logos and Eros.

  The map was a conventional one of European “Christendom,” with the outlines of the Roman Empire superimposed in all its varicose purplescence, cutting improbably through Spain and England, across Middle Gaul to the Rhine, then falling precipitously along the Danube, where the lines veered off to the northeast, to the no-name land of the beech forests where we made our home. On the far left edge of the map was Martha’s Vineyard, and on the far right, Ulan Bator, both pink, the former incised by the three diagonal lines indicating marsh, the latter surrounded by scalloped lines denoting desert.

  Father addressed himself to the pretensions of those Rome-centered minds who bequeathed nothing but ruins, noise, and organized cheating in merchandising the corpses of their ancestors. As long, he insisted, as the Professor was so interested in regions which could not, as it were, speak for themselves, perhaps he might pay some attention to the 95% of the dehellenized ancient world from which both their ancestors had come by cart (albeit from different directions) and to which they would undoubtedly one day return by similar conveyan
ce. Then he drew an X upon the map at the exact location where they now sat. He would speak, he made it clear, not on behalf of the empire and its labored self-conscious chroniclers, but of those who exploded it, those whose lands stretched from northern Ireland to northern India, whose names and languages we do not know. He would speak in brief for all barbarians, celebrate their perpetual playful ambush of the pygmy Romans humping away in their lonely bathhouses on the Mze, all balls and no prick. In his tumultuary acclamation, the Roman cavalry was cut to pieces by an immensely tall and exotically beautiful people, with long penises and tight scrotums, those warriors whom the Professor blamed for the glacial battles in our hippocampus, whose campaigns resurface in wife-beating, pederasty, and all the other gratuitous violences of street and stable.

  “Why is it, Professor, that the story is always told in terms of inner collapse, of debauchery in high places, poor leadership, corruption, subversion of the constitution, debased currency, or flawed electoral processes? Why not in terms of the superiority of the invaders, not only tactically, but in the measure of their courage, and the superiority of their nomadic culture?”

  Father took up a shooting stick from the umbrella stand and tapped it on the map as if it were a divining rod. “Do we measure a people by its glut of architecture, their impulse to brick over every last inch of green earth on the continent, rivaled in excess only by the Dark Ages, when they built a church for every two-hundred inhabitants in Christendom? Architecture tells us zero. When our people moved they didn’t have any idea of where they were going or what they would do when they got there. They failed to seize almost every favorable circumstance. Is this so hard to grasp? All they knew is they had to turn the pressure from their front and rear somehow to their advantage. Now, that’s a human heritage to be proud of, Professor. No lyric there, I suspect, just the purest kind of physics. Look!” The shooting stick slapped the map with a sharp report. “In one pass it’s all Wagnerian flame and thunder; in another, a miserable group unsure even of its own race, driven by abstract ratios of bears to berries, indifferent to treasure, hair golden and pitch, eyes both bright blue and dark as midnight. Startled fugitives, they look into the cradle of the world and all they see is a vast landscape of categories, and small works of art that you might bury with your mother. And each time they made a breach, inadvertently overrunning another tribe, they would absorb whomever was there, and in so doing only open an inroad at their rear for a tribe even more savage and disconcerted than themselves! That, my friend, not Master Gubik’s mythotherapy, is the story of civilization, and one which does not lend itself to excavation.”