Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

His English was so precise and Anglophone that it was intimidating. The only indication that Iulus was a foreigner, apart from the usual troubles with “th” and “w,” and an occasional word which took on a guttural German ring, was his studied avoidance of the more inflected vowels of Oxonian cadences, as if to acknowledge the superior oral manners of a certain intellectual class, while at the same time disapproving of it. He took great delight in coming up with exact technical terms, emitting a prideful smile when searching for a colloquial phrase and finding it convincing. “Buckeye!” he roared, gesticulating at a huge horsechestnut. “That’s what you would call it, no?” To an American ear, it was as if the English language had been written for brass. And each syllable had the clarity of a note struck with a mallet.

The dogs led us through a switchback of crimson rhododendron and we emerged overlooking the manor. It was bordered by two great bodies of water, one free-flowing and clear as a trout stream, the other completely stagnant and silted, without so much as a mayfly’s ripple. “One of my grandfather’s projects,” Iulus declared offhandedly, “the result of a pub bet. You see before you a river in which you can step twice.”

“Did he win?” I offered cheerfully. “Hard to say. It might have been on a technicality; one can step in it twice, but only once? I used to believe that Heraclitus was wrong because we all bathe in the same river of Time, ever more limpid and ever deeper at the selfsame point of its flowing. But now I believe him wrong because you cannot step in it even once. Is there a word in English,” he mused, “for a contradiction in which both conflicting propositions are false?”

My mind scuttled along like a lost lizard as I looked away.

The Professor returned to Semper Vero every second Sunday, met punctually each time by the golden horse and a different type of conveyance from our large collection, though on some occasions he rented his own gig and piebald mare, without driver, from the Skopje. And in those months Wolf was indeed improving, walking tall, though fits of hauling would still come over him without warning as he gulped horseturds by the bucketful.

It was agreed that in the interim each of them would be free to practice their competing therapies upon the dog in question, on the assumption that any deviation from his present neurasthenia could only be a step in the right direction, and that in defiance of Hippocrates’s Oath, any treatment would be better than nothing.

My father had seen at once that Wolf, like Scharf, was a hopeless case whom only the most intensive treatment and objective attention would make remotely palatable, and that a cure in any acceptable sense was impossible. He knew the only hope lay not in therapies, but in that as the Professor’s love for the animal became stronger, his expectations would be fewer.

Wolf did not intrigue him. Felix knew his own courting would be halfhearted, and that the dog would pick it up immediately. His suspicion was that Wolf ’s unwillingness to please ought to be respected and cataloged, even though it would not produce so much as a footnote in the glories of insanity. The dog simply had an Asian acceptance of the kennel, preferring the clean barter between prisoners and wardens to the stresses of demonstrating constant alertness and educability. His merry fellows in the adjacent runs he wouldn’t give so much as a sideways glance. Perhaps he half-thought he deserved incarceration, Felix speculated.

To Father’s credit, he tried to develop more subtle commands using an old Astingi training lexicon in which there were over a thousand words, or rather sounds, for “Down!” this on the theory that if both patient and trainer could achieve a “Down!” without terminal consequences, it might by confidence bring the dog back from death’s door — in other words, the animal, in recognizing a bottom, might respond with a kind of spiritual bounce.

But even in the far richer Astingi (so dense it could turn any phrase into its exact opposite), he noted there was no command for “danger,” just as there was no command to live. “Down” was all there was, a kind of drug in which dosage was everything, a thousand slightly different intonations of the same metaphor.

Wolf for his part seemed to very much enjoy this chorus of a thousand “down”s. It was a kind of music to him, and he bobbed his head in time, wagging his broken tail, once even performing a kind of Russian dance, which was the only time his hindlegs stopped quivering. But he never so much as sat, even while all around him the Chetvorah, even the nine-week-old pups, flattened themselves happily upon the earth at the Astingi intonations.

Clearly, the libretto of his own opera did not interest Wolf, and to actually take such language seriously would have been a serious offense to his aesthetic sensibilities. Felix took the precaution of keeping the water bucket at a low level so the animal could not drown himself.

On each of his visits, the Professor would go directly to Wolf ’s kennel, clap him in a soldierly embrace, and try out his latest idea, as if to shun the vulgar instrumentality of Father’s telephone cord and the Dresden connection.

The Professor tried sulphate of quinine, oil of turpentine, rest, exercise, hot baths, cold baths, colored glasses, and electric sparks. He placed three magnets on the animal’s polar areas, put his front feet into a bucket full of hydrogen sulfide, and after bending Wolf into a backward arc, tipped him backward and forward to get his inner fluids moving. He donned a lilac surgeon’s smock and waved an iron wand over him. But all this produced only an occasional bemused twitch.

Floundering from failure to failure, he tried injecting vitamins directly into the vein, massaging the carotid artery and skull plates with homeopathic tinctures, and putting on a pair of galvanic socks that combined electricity and reflexology, but the only result was that Wolf suffered abdominal disorders which eventually affected the entire kennel.

One day he even hooked up a water hose to a special brass nozzle he had brought from the sanitarium, and directed the pressured stream upon Wolf ’s chest, which at first the dog reacted to with amusement, but then flew into a rage at and screamed like a jungle animal, pushing first his nose, then a front leg through the mesh of the kennel, severely damaging the ligaments and tearing out two claws at the root.

As Father bandaged the paw, he said, “The ‘stand aside’ is the most elemental maneuver, my friend. You really ought to try it once.”

And as it became clear that his experiments did not shock but only bemused my father, the Professor seemed to lose his enthusiasm. More charitably, it might be said he was distracted by the everyday life of the farm. Equally at home in the world of the microscopic — the nerve life of eels’ testicles — as in the largest abstractions in the history of suffering, the Professor seemed taken aback by every barnyard animal, astonished that a chicken might walk where it pleased, and dumbfounded that a woman might garrote one and boil it as she pleased. The life of the barnyard, he remarked, was so much richer than that of the Therapeian woods, which to hear him tell it was made up of nothing but large, dying trees, on one side of which were kissing couples, and on the other, a tight-lipped voyeur brandishing a forked twig.

Father, of course, detested both the microscope and telescope, as well as the X-ray and the mirror, and most of all photography. He hated anything which disconnected an image from its source, as befitted a master of the middle distance and a strong believer in the leash. Nothing amused him more than the faith which intellectuals placed in representation, especially as he watched the Professor wander among ducks and geese without the slightest naturalistic interest, pausing only to inspect the funnel with which Ainoha force-fed them warmed gruel. The Professor ran his palm across the phalanges and grease nipples of Father’s American steam tractor, which squatted, purred, and farted like any other farm animal. And when shown a bitch in the throes of producing a litter, the Professor praised her obliviousness to pain as she snapped the umbilical cords with her jaws and licked each pup clean of its gelatinous membrane, all while keeping one eye upon her observers and emitting, between chomps and caresses, a suitably polite growl. When the Professor mentioned that he too had come into this world with a caul, Father replied drily that all pups, even the runt, had such a fibroid helmet, and that it premonited nothing more than it protected, because at the very moment those cute little mugs were entering the world, the fetal brain, recognizing itself in the boring lap of domestic luxury, kills half its cells.