Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

This was not a novel notion. We knew that Hitler (“That handsome boy who never rode a horse,” as Iulus’s father called him) was constructing a vast redoubt in the Bavarian mountains from which to conduct a last stand, as well as house his art collection. As in the First World War, the only strategic reason for our bloody forcedmarch upon Cannonia was to cut off a potential German retreat. Our information was based on intercepts of cables from the Cannonian foreign minister, Count Zich, to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Oshima, offering shelter in Cannonia for the imperial family portraits, consistent with the traditional Cannonian foreign policy of keeping a foot in every camp, and further suggesting that the location of the true inner redoubt was in salt mines in the Unnamed Mountains of Cannonia, which already housed Hitler’s own Vermeer, The Artist in his Studio ; the Ghent Altarpiece; the first page of the “Song of Hildebrand”; and a world-class collection of toy soldiers. Not for nothing did the advancing Soviet army carry with them carloads of art experts. Terra XX was to be defended to the death by a half-million, hand-picked men and women, the Wolverines, who were already infiltrating and toughening the SS, whose mission it was not only to prolong the war indefinitely, but to launch terroristic attacks throughout the continent from the most inaccessible part of Europe. Of course we know today that this was not precisely true. But I also know that the top-secret documents relating to it in the archives have been retrospectively falsified.

In any event, our advance column breached the Hron and, leaving Dede-Agach and her wasp-waisted women, slowly negotiated the trackless wastes of the Marchlands on a southeasternly salient, without a single act of resistance, indeed without a single incident of any kind. Through our binoculars we scanned the villages where no flag flew, a village darkness like no other darkness. (“A land so poor that even the crows fly upside down to avoid seeing it,” was how an eighteenth-century traveler had described it.) In not-so-short order, outrunning our gasoline supplies, our armored column finally spread out over some seventy miles. Directed by scurrying jeeps and swooping Piper Cubs, we finally reached a perfectly unknown double-oxbow of the Mze.

Breached for the first time since Napoleon, the Mze had proven a disappointment in every way. Planes had photographed it, engineers had studied it for months, generals had dreamed of nothing else. But when we got there it wasn’t as big as the Mississippi, or as beautiful as the Hudson, or as rough as the Colorado — just graygreen, cold, and unimpressive. “Never halt on the near side of a river, even if you do not intend to exploit the crossing.” Had that ancient injunction not been pounded into us in War College, we would have never have forged the Mze. As it was, the engineer in charge of the pontoon bridge was in despair when he was told it had taken him twelve hours longer than it had taken Julius Caesar. But soon our first column of tanks crossed the bridge, draped now with drying wash, captured flags, and laughing naked spitting boys. And an hour later, on the firmer ground of a glacier scour, our half-tracks crested the bluffs of yet another bend of the Mze. Downriver, a dozen locomotives were parked on a siding, alongside barges packed with knocked-down submarines. The trains had been blasted to smithereens, one locomotive pointing straight up, like a dog begging on its hind legs. The current was so stolid that it gave no reflection whatsoever. There was not even the trace of an eddy, a fleck of foam. It made not the slightest sound. “Let’s go down and piss in it,” my sergeant driver said, and so we did.

Once relieved, I chanced to glance up, and on the far bank I could make out a band of silent mounted men, an Astingi advance guard which I recognized by their raspberry overcoats and high fur hats, something you don’t often see in April. They were gazing down at us paternalistically, as they had for three thousand years, witnessing the besmirched Matron of Christendom as she once again walked into their shallow stream to perish. After buttoning up their overcoats and letting off a single rifle shot, they held up an odd three-fingered salute and filed silently away behind a dome of rocks.

So it was that we came to parade rest on Cannonia’s watery border, about to read her secretmost entrails, prepared to open a spacious wound in Hell’s own soil, dig out ribs of gold, and build a Pandemonium. We had no experience with that long tradition in which the cheerful and well-intentioned tyrant, with his perverse magnanimity and wooden hug, enters the ghostly empire to pick up the beautiful corpse, only to have it fall apart in his hands. Indeed, we believed, even more than the communists, that we had captured a stage of history — the worst thing, according to Astingi lore, that can befall a people.

That night, all along the Mze, our artillery massed hub to hub, we lay down a coordinated fire the likes of which even the most battle-hardened veteran had never seen. The Conqueror was smiling in his chariot, and his horses smiled the same hard smile. You could read the dark book of history as if it were daylight; the barrage threw all the objective ground to be taken into bold and summary relief. We had been ordered to explode all four corners of Cannonia. But she never really caught, only smoldered. A stench of blasted muck hung over the country for years after the war as the louring Commander reined in his foaming steeds.

We had hardly bivouacked when an old soldier came stumbling out of the forest in a uniform cobbled together from five or six nations, and began to spill the beans in several different languages before we even put him on the ground. His first words were a warning not to shell the barges down river, as they were loaded with poison gas. Then he added proudly that this was the exact spot he had surrendered in the First World War. “I can’t read or write,” he muttered, “but I can sing.” My rule then as now was to never interrogate a prisoner under forty, for you can learn little from a man who still thinks he has something to prove.

I can’t say that we completely understood him, our proficiency in languages being of a strictly schoolboy nature, and it became increasingly clear that Öscar Özgur was something of an idiot, though quite calm and professional about it.

But Öscar had in his possession a letter written on violet stationery in rather grandiloquent French, addressed to no one in particular, sealed with the waxen emblem of a petite noblesse terrienne , as well as the last attestatory secret code of our man behind the lines. There was also a latitude and longitude for a proposed rendezvous, and the promise of a bonfire burning. The family crest portrayed a nymph trying on a crown (the infamous Venus of Muranyi, I was to learn) astride an inscription: “Back to the original sources.” It concluded rather formally, with my contact’s swirling vermillion signature dusted with cinnabar.

. . Venez, si vous voulez, et recevez notre couronne.

Nous causons souvant des delices de notre

maison viste don’t le souvenir me s’effacera

jamais de nos coeurs mille et mille amities .

Sauve Que Peut , Iulus

Naturally, the letter stunned me. Even the most dedicated student of Cannonian affairs could not have anticipated such a windfall. I admit I had the stench of priceless treasures and czar’s gold in my nostrils. My putative superiors were still well to the rear, and there was little point in torturing such a pathetic messenger with further cross-examination. Things were loose at the front in those days, my OSS papers invited no questioning from even the most belligerent rednecked MP, and the letter seemed to fulfill the spirit of my vague orders. I may have lacked Zeus’s stamina and colorful disguises, but I had his roving eye. I wanted to do things with Cannonia, some gently, some not so, some with long graceful movements, some with short automatic bursts. And then of course, I wanted to pick up her broken body and be cheered in the streets. These were not the naïve sentiments of a wild-eyed boy. That was always to be the fatal misapprehension of our adversaries. For we were born harsh, beyond the Gulf Stream. We only looked soft and shiny — like a larva, concealing a stinger enfolded in its heavy blond wings — a vast armada of Detroit steel and Texas oil, beneath a comic sheen. I was looking for no vista, I can tell you, no place to meditate, no real estate. When you grow up looking at nothing but billboards and telephone poles, and your only relation to the past is Euclidian geometry, you don’t mind looking, properly armed, straight into the jaws of hell. And in Cannonia, where the sky meets the ground like no place else on earth, at dusk everything is the color of a runaway dog.