Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

To tell you the truth, I never felt either courageous or foolhardy. I had spent most of the war pretending I wasn’t baffled. I never heard from anyone a patriotic sentiment. We were simply fatalistic. And we felt so much more akin to the Germans and the Russians that we could hardly believe we were fighting with the English and the French. I mean let’s be honest about it. Was anything ever more fun than picking up the Europids — those peoples who have made an artform of feeling sorry for themselves — in their unparalled wickedness, and bringing them sternly to account? You can get away with murder in America, but only in Europe can you be really bad. My specialty and my nearsightedness had so far protected me from the more suicidal missions in which our men behind the lines had been my proxy. I had a burning desire to do good. And to kill somebody.

Orders in my pocket and invitation in hand, I was nevertheless overcome by an anxiety I had never felt in battle, a horror vaccui , in which even a tear for our sacrifices would not flow. I have never felt such unease or uncomprehending fear as I did that late afternoon on the Mze. Old hands call it Fingerspitzengefuhl (fingertiptingling), and it is more addictive than sex. But what good is foretelling if you cannot forestall the disasters you foresee?

I commandeered a jeep, and on a makeshift runway in a sugarbeet field, after presenting my doctored Joint-Chief-of-Staff ’s laissez passer , talked a bored flyboy into taking me up. I don’t know what kind of plane it was, only that the takeoff seemed longer than the flight.

The manor house of Semper Vero squatted phlegmatically upon the flattened top of an eroded volcanic cone. From the base of the old volcano, blackened vineyards and chocolate-colored fields fell away on all sides, interspersed with patches of mustard flared with poppies. Each irregular field was partitioned with musk rose and yellow gorse, and every inch was cultivated to the very edge of a serpentine road which ended abruptly at the base of steep forested slopes. As Iulus poled me across the Mze, in a strange copper-prowed caique, I again consulted my maps, and realized that this rim of heavy dark primeval forest was the same wall of oak and beech that Marcus Aurelius had rightly feared as the home of the barbarian, and yet it was here, in the only forward outpost in which he felt truly safe, that he laid down his pen and died. The river at this crossing point seemed to be encased with sheets of steel.

The walled park surrounding the house was filled entirely with evergreens: blueblack spruce, lime-green tsuga, the feathery apricot of Zelkova, and an occasional bright minaret of golden cypress, amidst a deep sprawl of weeping hemlock and thick red trunks of fragrant cedars. The ancient Cannonian saying has it that “trees and men are friends,” and Semper Vero was the arboreal testament that the non-indigenous could flourish and thrive in Cannonian soil, as long as they were planted close enough together to endure the brutal cross-winds which had dragged me so many miles. It was also clear that in Cannonia even the seasons were compressed and overlapped, and everywhere spontaneous mutation was emphasized over evolution. After all, I too was something of a farm boy, growing up in Ohio nursery country on the lip of the great glacier, and for each huge specimen that Iulus proudly pointed out I had seen in its two-year form in five-gallon cans along the highway or on a truck, and I knew its four-color seasonal blooms from a catalog. I may have been inexperienced, but I was hardly naïve about the trials of beautification projects.

We approached the manor by a narrow winding peat road, through the filigree of a beech grove in bud, passing a massive empty fountain, a sulfurous diagonal stripe across its marble rim the only trace of its former water jet. It was obvious I was not the first combatant to visit Semper Vero. The retreating Germans had time only to gouge some second-rate plein d’air paintings from their frames, the amber inlays from the library, the nametags from the arboretum (only the ones in Latin), and after boobytrapping the winecellar, left singing at the top of their lungs. Shortly thereafter, a motorized Siberian advance column had arrived in padded winter uniforms and pressed their perspiring Mongol faces against the long French windows. They crated up the tractor and generator, drank the cologne and brakefluid, and after eating a puppy, blew several of themselves up with the wine. Yet as far as I was concerned, this all could have happened a thousand years ago.

The house appeared to be constructed of every historical style imaginable, a marvelous mad medley of academic and ad hoc concepts, its Byzantine aspects reproachful of its gothic elements, its Victorian additions so expressive in their hatred for everything baroque. And yet despite these open contradictions and hostilities, the house, like my host, exuded in the midst of its pathetic, humiliated, and mutilated little country an enormous self-assurance and intimidating ease; and the great appeal of an abandoned house is, after all, the thrill that the owner is going to catch you in it. I will not pretend to be able to render a specific impression of that eccentric house, except to say that its main beauty lay in the abandoned and overgrown park that surrounded it, madder rose and mariposa lilies mingling beneath the open branches of fig trees and dark allées of cypress, down which an unmarked divebomber, its ordnance spent, occasionally roared incuriously.

From a squat central turret, a tattered gray flag embroidered with a mauve rose still flew.

Iulus did not often look you in the eyes, but when he did you had the unnerving feeling he was looking right to the back of your skull. Dressed in tennis flannels of another era, he conducted our tour of the park with a slightly bored air, as if he had been preparing for this moment all his life and could have gone through it in his sleep. We wandered down the overgrown enfilades bordered with parasol pines and groves of catalpas planted upon mounds, glomerations of plane trees, clusters of cutleaved ash, spruce with huge wartlike thickenings, clumps of unpruned Schwedler maples, and two-hundred-year-old specimens of silk pine and ginkgo. He encouraged me to explore the sightlines to every point of the compass, noting that one could see an enemy approaching from any direction. Eventually we made our way through a ravine in which four or five hundred oaks and chestnuts had been uprooted by stray artillery.

“If I were an American,” Iulus spoke at length for the first time, as if to wish away the blasted landscape, “I would tell you that this park holds the greatest collection of evergreens east of the Rhine, and is one of two places in the world (the other is in China) where northern and southern forests commingle in a thin belt at the nether lip of the Ice Age.”

He had an amazingly deep and magnificent voice, something like a cello, one of those voices which seem to come out of the entire skull rather than the facial cavity, and he had mastered the trick of lowering it a register still further when interrupted, surprising me into a listening silence. “You are standing in the most botanically diverse place on earth,” he concluded, “where the coniferous and deciduous, the foliate and naked, the arctic spruce, the fig, and magnolia can exist perfectly composed, side by side.” Then he stepped back and gestured toward the southern vista.

Across the deadly swath of uprooted trees, great clouds of multicolored dust and leaves spiraled across the lime green bog which always threatened to engulf the country. Enormous yews, disfigured either by human ignorance or malice, their untrimmed tops whirling out of control like inverted peacocks, formed a living tsuga colonnade racked with brown spot. The dogs had bolted down a path, leading us to the “Chinese Pavilion,” a ruin large enough to quarter half a cavalry regiment, where the vista opened across meadows full of wildflowers to a plain where the glacier had given itself up in an ice meadow. “An arm of the lost inland sea,” Iulus noted with satisfaction, pointing out a series of spheroidal boulders which seemed to have been dispersed with great care. They lay in glistening clumps like stiffened eggwhites, as if pieces of cumulus had fallen to earth, in what appeared to be the remnants of a long abandoned golfcourse, crossed and recrossed by a rutted brown road overhung with weeping witchhazel. Below us, he explained with an air of detached melancholy, stretched the valley of the White Vah, a gash between two ridges of Paleozoic minerals, where phyllites and porphyroids had been mined from time immemorial. We traversed the almost vertical slopes, dotted with ilex, olive, and wild rhubarb, and punctuated with rills and torrents. As we crossed and recrossed the rough bed of a cataract with very low water, I noticed that this was the only place, since I had entered the country where there was no wind at all. “The climate is such that we could have marginally supported oranges and lemons,” Iulus concluded. “But no one with a true interest in nature and the cycles of the seasons would consciously cultivate the soft androgyny of the Mediterranean. Wouldn’t you say?”