Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Felix folded his arms and delivered his lay opinion that the dog had been pulled on so much that his natural impulse was now to pull himself, wanting like anyone to put a little loop into his future. And he could play this game only by exhausting his tenacious master. The good news was that the dog in question was not timid, not a layabout like dear departed Scharf. His illness was simply an inappropriate response to the stress of everyday life.

“He doesn’t want to run away, Herr Doktor. He just wants some slack.” The Professor took this in gravely and repeated it to himself as if he were translating from a foreign language.

“Then he’s not. . a revolutionary?”

“If so, a very poor one.”

Closing one brown eye and rising to a knee, the Professor opined that perhaps the freedom and fresh air of Cannonia might ameliorate the situation. Felix shook his head slowly.

“When a bear is uncultured, you do not tie him in a forest.”

This brought forth from the Professor a huge shrug, as if from his very soul, signifying, “What is to be done, then?”

Felix looked the Professor in the eye and reached into an inside jacket pocket, where he always kept a delicate choke collar of the tiniest blueblack Dresden steel ringlets. He held the collar up for his client as a jeweler holds a necklace for the bride, making a shimmering circle of dark silver and iron.

“Training, Herr Doktor Professor, tra inin g,” he whispered, trilling the n s.

My father was a man of many pockets: one for tobacco, one for sweets, one for the Dresden collar, one for dry husks of bread, and one from which he now withdrew a crimson kerchief, which he knotted around his neck. He needed to work the dog without distraction, so he ushered the Professor into the house, where, not finding Mother at home, the visitor could be seen in the staircase window, faded and grave as in a daguerreotype. Through the leaded glass, he watched the two murky figures in the courtyard.

At first, Felix slowly circled the panting, spittleflecked Alsatian, moving with his back against a dark green privet hedge. Then he held up a husk of bread.

“Komin zee heer, Wolfie.”

Trailing his rope, the dog approached tentatively, but then took the husk from Felix’s hand and walked about sniffing and scratching it like a chicken, while occasionally peering over his shoulder at the knotted rope, then back at his immaculate food source. Felix continued to pass out husks with one hand, while with the other he opened a large flapped pocket that had been lined with surgical rubber so that the blood of game might easily be removed. (He had one sewn in all his jackets, evening clothes included.) From this otherwise empty game pocket he now withdrew a strand of insulated electrical wire as long as he was tall. My grandfather Priam had refused to install electricity at Semper Vero, and the week after he died, his wife, age spots on her temples as large as silver dollars, had the entire house and every outbuilding wired, socketed, and telephoned. It was this original telephone wire — flexible yet holding a shadow of the shape your hands might give it — Felix now held, a line without hard edges which could be looped or straightened, and along which willed energy might run like no other conductor, alternating impulses of discipline and freedom.

Gently, he looped the steel ringlets about Wolf ’s neck, attached the telephone cord to one ring, and keeping plenty of slack, strolled along the privet hedge. Wolf grimaced and dug in, preparing to haul his newest interlocutor beyond the horizon. But just as the lead grew taut, Felix turned his wrist a quarter-turn, and keeping his elbow stationary, gave a delicate if abrupt jerk, as if he were scything through a single stalk of wheat. The Dresden collar slipped through itself and the ringlets popped tight on Wolf ’s larynx, emitting a click like a cartridge being chambered.

The dog’s eyes bulged, then he coughed politely, and rather than hauling stopped short. As he did so, the collar slipped back open and the cord went slack. Wolf was fleetingly aware of a parenthesis of liberation, the triumph of cessation, that moment when your lover allows you to take her by the throat while your own head is cradled in her hands like a melon.

Then my father coiled the cord, leaving the collar hanging loose, and Wolf walked beside him calmly, looking up occasionally in disbelief, as the figure in the window broke into silent applause, then raced down the staircase.

“To touch the compulsion,” the Professor expostulated breathlessly, “is near enough the soul. . And you didn’t even have to hurt him!”

“I will never hurt him,” Father said evenly. “You must trust me.”

“The question is whether I can bear it,” the Professor sighed. For the first time his tone was somewhat jocular. “I only fear that he will come to prefer you.”

“These are the chances we all must take. Who knows who deserves whose loyalty? What do you want most of all, sir? What is your greatest wish for the dog in question?”

“I want him. . to stay ,” the Professor mused, “or if not precisely stay, at least not run from me.”

“You must not confuse running away with hauling. The question, I believe, is not one of disappearing, but of constantly jerking you about.”

“I still do not see how force. . such manipulation can accomplish anything lasting.”

“Ah, well, don’t you see, it’s just the right amount of force, applied at exactly the right time and place. It takes a lifetime to learn, if I may say so.”

“Will you teach it to me, then?”

“Ah, my friend, you are not ready. Humans don’t have the sense to submit. The dog bites only hard enough to make a point. Yes, we think dogs almost human, and dogs think we are other dogs. Which do you think is closer to the truth? Remember St. Augustine: you won’t see God until you become as a little dog. When you are ready, the teacher will appear. That I guarantee.”

“I suppose you mean that we learn only by punishment!” the Professor intoned morosely.

“Not exactly. We learn by the threat of a thrashing administered against a background of love. Think of it as a loving withdrawal. Even gentleness must be enforced.”

“I still do not comprehend your preliminary diagnosis.”

“Well, if it’s analogy you want, I should say that what we have here is the soul of a horse trapped in the body of a dog.”

“Then poor Wolf believes himself to be a horse?”

“No. He knows he’s not a horse. He just wants to feel like a horse, because he believes the horse to be superior.”

“I’m not sure I grasp. .”

“It’s like this. You don’t want a bottle of wine, do you? No, you want the feeling it gives. What we’re saying to Wolfie is, go right ahead and feel like a horse if you like. Just don’t behave like one when you’re around me.”

“This is hardly scientific, Councilor.”

“Ah, dear friend, facts may be different, but feelings are the same. And it’s not the thinking that’s hard. It’s selling the thinking, Herr Professor.”

“In my experience,” the Professor muttered defensively, “one can often observe in human illness the neuroses of the animals.”

“Perhaps. But the satisfying thing about dogs is that they fear what actually happens, not fear itself. Therefore, the teacher must constantly fight his way into reality, all the while maintaining detachment.”

“But how can we proceed before we locate the trauma, immaterial as it may be?”

“What do we start with, you say? My poor self and this poor dog. That is all. Our origins are different, our values are different, our ends are different. They are all incompatible and they cannot be pushed beyond their limits. But they can be imaginatively understood, if there is a cord, a simple cord.”