Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Cannonia was the only place in the European theater that had not yet seen action, an island of calm, a mote of silence in which dog shows were still regularly scheduled beneath aerial dog fights, and indeed, under the pressure of invasion, the populace had become, from all evidence, even more lighthearted, carefree, and erotically active than ever. During our bombing runs they repaired excitedly to their cinemas and cafes in the saltmines, cheerfully attesting to the Roman observation that “the best part of Cannonia is underground,” as well as their local slogan, “to be well hidden is to live well.” We were always somewhat taken aback at how well fed the Cannonian civilians seemed to be. During a lull in the advance on Dede-Agach, we were taken by damsels in white dresses and parasols to a chocolate factory where the sugar ran higher than my boottops.

I had left the crystal decanters and chandeliers of OSS (Oh So Secret) London so hastily that no one had backgrounded me on Cannonia. Our man behind the lines had brought the good news out for nothing, I was to take the bad news back at salary, the only distinction between enlisted man and officer, as far as I could see. My mission was straightforward: walk the cat back to Dog Cannonia, make contact with Iulus, and pick up the Holy Crown, the symbol of the nation’s legitimacy, before the Russians could snatch it.

One of my old college chums, Ed Kirby, then as now a reliable courier, rode with me to the aerodrome. He seemed uncharacteristically nervous, stroking his not prominent chin and crossing and recrossing his unmilitary wingtipped brogues. But he had my orders directly from the Potomac. In essence they were this: the Hron was our stopline. Make no commitments of any sort. We should assist any retreating Germans (Marshall Zhukov was quite right to complain about this) and should we encounter any Russians, be prepared to exchange small presents, and avoid wearing your good pistol or expensive watch.

Ed had brought with him the Cannonian file. There was nothing in it but a yellowed Herald Tribune clipping about some unpaid World War One reparations, railway schedules from the 1930s, a letter from the Rockefeller Foundation refusing a grant to rebuild a Cannonian cathedral, as their guidelines precluded funding a pagan institution, as well as portions of the diary of a seventeen-year-old daughter of an Austrian diplomat who had taken a pony cart tour at the turn of the century. “The wind blows differently here,” she began.

Ed’s own knowledge of Cannonia seemed to be restricted entirely to memories of Comp Lit at Princeton. “The Cannonians believe that every life, like every book, has three beginnings and three endings, but there’s no choosing between them. One must accept them all. That’s the Cannonian twist, their Triplex Philosophia . There’s always a twist in Cannonia,” he said somewhat sarcastically. “Stand fast and wait to be contacted.”

Those were Ed’s grinning last words as he saw me aboard the blacked out DC-3, handing me a copy of American Plans for a New Cannonia — a tome, to tell you the truth, I have never finished to this day. Suffice it to say that as the Cannonians had perfected bourgeois life to its ne plus ultra (a source of particular fascination to the Soviets) their history was one of continual collaboration with any government which had the temerity to announce itself, and their insatiable pursuit of private pleasures made them the most unreliable allies imaginable. We had not taken their foolish and comic declaration of war upon us seriously, and while they might well be “damned inconvenient,” as Sumner Wells put it, our interests there were not material, and our policy was one of “limited encouragement.” Nevertheless, as a kind of farewell present to the Soviets, whose appallingly mauled remnants were now making their appearance amongst us, it was thought that we might contact and offer support to a potential guerrilla force, a semi-nomadic tribe known as the Astingi, allegedly the last tribe of prehistory to keep their name and language intact. Free of all modern malaises, the Astingi would fight at the drop of a hat. “To be vanquished and not surrender — that is victory” was their slogan. Their brief, “to prick every woman in the world as well as every Empire.” They had fought with Napoleon in 1805 and against him in 1809, fought with Lafayette in 1775 and with the British in 1812, and were even said to have intervened in our Civil War, somewhere in Florida. They had no heroes, no myths, no lost nation, and no promised land. They neither founded nor wandered. They had come from nowhere and disappeared into nothing, long-nosed, subtly smiling, and sensitive-footed, moving only at night, leaving no traces above the ground, mystifying the barbarians with their imperturbable discipline and appalling the Romans with their permissiveness (the husbands actually sitting down to dinner with their wives).

They were by now the most rugged race left on the planet, jolted on horseback from the day they were born, occupying the great crystal clear high Plateau of Crisulan at the source of the Hor, an area by turns parched as the Sahara, barren as the Gobi, and cold as the Arctic, where the tallest plant to be found is the wild onion, and more impractical to the explorer than either of the poles. They believed in neither God nor the Devil, nor in the sacraments any more than the resurrection of the dead. Christians, Pagans, and Musselman alike had termed Cannonia the “country of the unbelievers.” Yet the Astingi apparently always had everything they needed. “Even their dog leashes were made of sausages,” as Herodotus noted. They thought the Cossacks wimps, the gypsies too sedentary, the Jews passive-aggressive, the gentry unmannered, the peasants too rich by half, the aristocracy too democratic, and the Bolsheviks and Nazis too pluralistic. When cornered, they would put their women and children in the front ranks, and fire machine guns through their wives’ petticoats. And in times of peace they were renowned for their impromptu traveling performances of Shakespeare and Chekhov. The only belief they shared with Americans was that the entire world was constituted of rings of peoples set up to protect them.

Their women, nimble, handsome, and accommodating, were celebrated for their extraordinary carriage and complexions varying between pink and bronze. The infidelity of wives was punished by a mild beating, while that of men by a fine of cattle. The men were famous for their outspokenness, friendliness, and nonstop humor. They seemed to be everything I admired — handsome, intelligent, and reckless, with a healthy relation to life and oblivious to death.

To be honest, I didn’t see we had much to offer them. Indeed, I had noticed in London that our intelligence briefings had become more complex and arcane as our forces approached the border. I took little interest in the internecine struggles our specialists described, backing one bandit one day then changing their allegiances the next. It was clear only that Cannonian politics were as gnarled, fecund, and impenetrable as their landscape, as useless to themselves as to others, and that a military mind could not even begin to plot their intricacy. So it was not surprising that our analyst’s lectures petered away self-consciously as glazed stares from the ranks became the norm.

But arriving at the front, I heard quite a different story. Among the guys, Cannonia was simply referred to as Terra XX, where it was rumored there was a secret redoubt at the exact geographical center of the continent, filled with art masterpieces, one hundred tons of gold, and heavy water, guarded by a battalion of yellow-eyed dogs and seven-foot mountain men in scarlet tunics — a cache in its scope and preciousness which made Cannonia at that time the most cultured nation on earth, as they had been regarded in the fourteenth century when their treasury and library exceeded that of France. We had been told to stand fast, coil up our formations, and clean up our flanks, but you could sense the renewed “fighting spirit” among the ranks.