Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“It seems, if I may say so, a project fraught with risk.”

“Whenever you weigh beauty and utility on the same scale, a kind of genetic civil war is created within the animal. When you are stronger, I will elucidate the costs and lessons.”

“But might a dog behave and not be well?”

“We are not concerned with the whole animal, because that leads us into ideology. Life is all concealed pistols and waxed slipknots, Professor. All we can manage is to make the dog face the facts.”

“The verdict, then; I tremble.”

“Ah, Wolf is so much a product of our time. The greater he contests your authority, the greater his need for authority. His willfulness is mirrored back at him, and he becomes even more disappointed with himself. The result is discontent without reference, for which there is no answer. All we have is demand — perverse, obstinate, insoluble, interminable demand! And so the therapy can never end. Are you prepared for such an outcome?”

The Professor walked in circles, squinting and pulling on his moustache.

“It would appear, Councilor, that I have little choice in the matter.”

Smoking their cigars, they walked arm in arm along the darkening river. Wolf and I gamboled after them, tripping one another up. I threw a stick in the water and the dog looked at me with disdain. He was getting better already.

“It’s all so vague and problematical,” the Professor mused. “How do you stand it, Councilor?”

“The transferal is incomplete, my friend, it is always incomplete. It’s the nature of the mechanism.”

“Why do you suppose they love us so? And why do we even bother with them ?”

Father stopped, and as they turned to look over the fields, delivered himself of something like a courtroom summation:

“This attachment to man is not born of consciousness, nor does it become conscious. Man, through the insensitivity of objects, feels homesick and alone. In his depths there is an earnest cry for intercourse. When he looks at things, they do not appear different; when he utters his cry there is no response. His conversation with nature has been silenced. The dog is the only one who remains, his reminder of the world of nature that has vanished. Snatched from our place in nature, all love seeks that which is lost, all that which is not itself. In the shimmering heat in the silent fields, we hear in the cry of the animal a call for companionship. The stronger the man, the more vulnerable he is to this. Then the dog finally comes, and together they search for unreal shelter.”

The two men stood with their arms about each other’s shoulders, discussing the mysteries of coordination and conduct, staring out into the unkempt fields in which huge hares bounced like kangaroos and quail called cloyingly to one another as raptors wheeled in the thickening sky. Wolf shoved his head in the tall grass, while leaving his body well outside the green envelope. A gadfly was playing about his limp tail.

“So,” the Professor mused, “we are back to the Jurassic. Horsetails high as oats, saurians running about.”

“Ah yes, my friend,” Father said proudly. “Out here in Klavierland we are truly, absolutely. . nowhere !”

They agreed that as unpromising as Wolf was, he deserved an indefinite trial, provided the Professor would visit regularly and participate in the great experiment.

“So,” the Professor sighed, “Wolf is a real survivor.”

“Sentimentality will shorten your life, my friend,” Father said softly. “One must be on guard with survivors. They will damage you.”

The Agent known as Iulus had the grave dignity and easy familiarity of the Cannonian gentry, taciturn and intent, without a hint of either fear or braggadocio. This was not, as I would come to recognize, the dignity of the freeborn, but of those who have witnessed the ineptitude and transitoriness of all great powers, and despite an inferior environment, have refused to be robbed of value. His wiry frame, although delicate, was extremely purposeful, cradling the infuriating hand-eye coordination of the natural athlete. If you threw a comradely arm about him you were instantly aware of a tremendous tensile strength for his slight size, a deadly serious will with a lightness of touch. He was the essence of the Schwermut , with that indolent charm which combines the alertness of the northern sailor with the impassive expression of the Byzantine, a youth who was used to talking on equal terms with both adults and animals. At twenty-one he gave the impression of having tried everything and renounced everything. He had no complaints and no hopes. But there wasn’t a touch of bitterness or self-doubt in his manner, and it was easy to see why women would go crazy over him.

The relations between himself and the dogs were formal and respectful, not those of master and pupil, much less man and beast. It was an older notion of conduct — that in order to preserve the integrity of the relationship, a true friend never feels the necessity to declare one’s love. It seemed both man and animal were in touch with a discipline beyond them, which announced that friendship might turn into love, but never the other way about. I knew I was already out of my depth, and that was just fine with me.

We proceeded through successive islets of forest, each interval exposing us longer in the dawning light, until finally our cover disappeared entirely as we traversed a corridor of open stubble fields. On their thickened edges, scythed exactly as high as a man’s thigh, I could make out other canine shapes, moon-colored dogs isolated in small packs, loping along as if attached to us by invisible wires, a kind of flanking cortege.

Then suddenly the flat and uninteresting country opened up into a vast amphitheater of hills, rising like immense solidified waves, increasing in size as they receded to merge into a great blank wall of naked granite peaks on the eastern horizon. The dirty gray glacial scour of the finest pumice fell sharply to the turgid river. On the far side Iulus pointed to a manor house, hunched like a yellow cat taking the sun out of harm’s way. “The Cannonian paradise,” he announced softly, and it was then I first beheld Semper Vero.

I was attached (under the cover of Divisional Historian) to the counter-intelligence unit of the 20th Armored Corps, XII Division, 65th Infantry, U.S. 3rd Army, Operation Hercules , which had been stopped (or rather, politically halted) in April of 1945, on the west bank of the Hron, where you could smell Cannonia, as you can smell an island in the sea. We could have easily pressed on into Cannonia Inferiore and taken the heights along the Mze, but the men were hardly willing to risk all in the last days of the war, and in any event, even if Roosevelt’s sudden death had not paralyzed the command, the textbook terrain was unsuited to armor. No one had ever been able to maneuver militarily in those vast, rich, flat, and foggy marchlands, for the most part undrained, unchanneled, and uncharted.

Admittedly, we had been through a rough patch of days, the deliberate sigh of the 70 mm artillery, the blustering howl of the Nebelwerfers, the thin whisper of mortars, and the evil singing of the 88s. But once “Roosenheimer’s Butchers” (as they referred to us on the German radio) broke through and routed the last of those Nazi champion diggers, we found ourselves alone alongside the turgid, steely Hron, and relaxed.

Cannonia was the closest, cruelest country for a fighting man, a veritable manmade jungle, a combination of ingenious irrigation, assiduous ancient cultivation, islets of virgin forest, and other trophy features of constructed wild topography. Calculatingly preserved from ancient times as royal hunting, smuggling, and pleasure grounds, it made even saturation bombing problematic. Every vineyard stake was topped with a bayonet against parachutists, every pathway had a false bottom. Every cemetery cross was sharpened, and even the chimps at the zoo were said to be armed. One could apparently march all the way to Russia beneath a deep canopy of trees, camouflaged in the never-ending sound of rushing brooks. The strategic possibilities of its underground rivers and saltmines appeared to be endless, its villages were dispersed and pocketed as if by a master strategist, and the “countryside” was simply a euphemism for vineyards and fields of white asparagus bordered with impenetrable hedgerows, in turn separated by marshes and canals. The whole territory was slathered by the serpentine tributaries and lesser streams of the Mze, Its, and Vah. The only possible military movement through the country was either by deep canal or narrow winding roads lined with lopped-off oaks, grapevines thick as a man’s arm and a hundred times more resilient, not to mention thickets of mulberry and false gorse. Every copse provided a perfect ambush, every thickwalled granary a line of fire, every capacious courtyard a potential boobytrap. Tanks might pass within thirty yards of one another and never be the wiser. When it was hilly there was not so much as a crag or cave to give cover, while the spectral flatness of its oft-bloodied plains elicited hallucinations. In short, the country’s strangely cultivated wildness blotted out any normal apprehension.