Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

When he had Wolf safely home, the Professor allowed the dog to accompany him everywhere, walking him at noon along the winding rue de Carcasses , and even feeding him in the anteroom beneath the portraits of allegorical women and splendid unread books.

The dog had amazingly little appetite, nor did he acknowledge food as the gift it was meant to be. His tail hung like a fox’s, as if appended by a nail. And when they encountered a stranger in the apartment stairwell, the dog did not acknowledge him but only made certain he was a step above or below the figure, remaining supremely indifferent to the nervous petting he evoked. The Dresden collar circleted loose about his neck, occasionally entrapping a broken ear.

The walks were particularly trying. While never a brisk perambulator, the Professor preferred a reasonable pace in order to reoxygenate his brain while perusing antiquarian shop windows. He had been having periodic problems with his feet, or more specifically his shoelaces, which would fray and burst without warning — and for some reason a loose shoe is one of the most disorienting things that can happen to a purposeful man. He had sent the servant girl out, but the laces she brought back were never a proper fit. And when he bent over to relace his boot, his heart pounded in his skull and his breath grew short—“abhypia” was his self-diagnosis. Relacing seemed to take an eternity, all that crossing and recrossing, creating slack and then drawing it tight, and during the process he often felt he should have done more sport as a child. If the laces were too short and he used only half the eyelets, painful pressure was exerted on his arch, yet his toes were left swimming in a fearful void. If too long, he cut them with a penknife, but this created a large, floppy unraveling bow on which he often tripped. He suspected Wolf of gnawing on the laces, but whenever he threw a shoe to tempt the culprit, the dog would look at him as if he had lost his mind. Throwing away a perfectly good shoe?

So it was with the walking. Wolf would follow behind him in mocking obedience, gradually pulling them into a kind of fuzzy art photograph of a stroll. But whenever they actually stopped — for the dog to urinate, or more often for the Professor to retie his shoe — just as he leaned down Wolf would start moving forward, albeit imperceptibly, and the dignified doctor would find himself hopping in the street, lurching and turning in a valse galatz , the leash wrapped around his leg and his ever-loosening shoe flopping on the pavement like an extinct appendage. Once the Professor had regained his footing and untangled them, Wolf would drop behind his heel in what appeared to be perfect compliance (strangers often complimented the animal’s street manners), but in fact the dog was drawing him back to a point of nullity, somehow behind time itself, abandoning their painfully won coordination.

The Professor knew the shortcut of soothing reassurance had failed, yet he lacked the conviction in his own reflexes to pop the chain and impose a mild penance. Indeed, his fear that he might do more harm the animal seemed able to calibrate precisely. (The gentle, sabotaging selfishness of the defenseless.) For all his submissive indifference, Wolf seemed to place an extraordinary, even profound, faith in his master’s increment of fear.

On occasion, usually late in the day, Wolf ’s sore nose would flare up, and the Professor would gaze down his nostrils with a small light. But he could find neither discharge nor irritation, only a long, glaucous tube ending in an opaque sheen of brain mass, unwrinkled like the advanced mammal he was posing as. The Professor noticed that it was only during this particular type of examination that Wolf ’s tail moved, if only the bushy tip, like a feather duster wafted by a particularly senile servant.

“Oh, Wolf, what did they do to you?” the Professor thought, a cry in his heart, and then he rephrased it out loud. “Or rather, what did they make you do? Was it those stupid aristocrats, or the crazed Bolsheviks?”

They settled into this routine over a period of weeks, the Professor now certain that he was saddled sadistically, perhaps forever, with the animal’s misgivings and disconnectedness. Meanwhile, the dog remained perpetually in wait, anticipating the next follow-up examination of his nose or paw, punctuated with bouts of what certainly appeared to be shame, for what else would cause the otherwise gray-white scar tissue to so promiscuously redden?

As a result, a fatal misunderstanding developed. While the Professor was adapting himself to Wolf ’s reserved nature, the dog wanted nothing more than to be inspected, preferably at the exact site of the wound, and as the Professor’s diagnostic attention dwindled, the symptoms of shame worsened. After the vilest supplications, accompanied by compulsive yawning, sighing, coughing, obsessive leg crossing, nose-boring, nail-biting, and flatulence, Wolf ’s manner became sharp. He hammered his scarred nose into the Professor’s groin, apparently threatening to spit up. He shoved his snout under his master’s writing hand, flipping the pen halfway across the room. And he dragged his crippled paw across the doctor’s thigh, leaving welts even through the heavy tweed. Wolf felt that his large, dark friend was abandoning him, and for his part, the Professor could not decide which horrified him most: his patient’s smothering affection or his invasive enmity.

Then, during a stroll, when his attention was focused on a particularly exotic sculpture in a shop window, he felt an uncharacteristically purposeful tug on the leash, and turning, found to his horror a blind beggar selling matchbooks on the sidewalk, with Wolf urinating on the stumps of the poor fellow’s amputated legs. Then and only then, at the height of his fury, did he pop the chain. He heard the click, a ghostly note. Wolf concluded his business, taking his good time, then, after turning slowly and halfheartedly, bit the Professor through his shoe, though without breaking the skin.

He spent long periods gazing into the animal’s eyes, now black as his own, which as the day expired seemed to give off a transient luminescence, a stored electricity generated from within. Yet by evening, when he turned on the paraffin desk lamp, the corneas went completely opaque, as if they were only reflecting external light. As the Professor’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness, Wolf ’s eyes emitted an eerie shine, and when he placed a shaving mirror next to the dog’s skull, he saw that his own had taken on the same cast, though not of the same deep quality. When he turned off the lamp and they sat in pitch-blackness, he faced the problem of reporting from a zone in which they were both blind. The Professor lit a candle nearby, adjusted the temples of his reading glasses to sharpen the magnification, and circled the dog slowly. From a certain angle his spectacles reflected the candlelight into Wolf ’s pupils, which suddenly lit up in a fantastic concatenation, brighter and more diaphanous than any star, and for a moment he thought he could make out a trace of the optic nerve through a web of blood vessels on the inner surface of the eye. Both were bathed for a moment in a spectacular fluorescent orange haze, and little mice of ejaculatory feeling ran along the base of the Professor’s spine, as the animal seemed to be seeing through him.

In the evening they would often sit on the divan together in a kind of mutual matrimonial inertia, the Professor smoking one cigar after another, Wolf pawing at his free hand while snapping at the smoke rings, deprived of the symptoms of hauling which had once brought them into such gripping interaction. Wolf must have finally felt that he had been written off, like an old unbalanced wife. And some evenings the Professor felt vaguely insulted that this refugee had assimilated so rapidly to his new surroundings, appearing to forget both his lost status as top dog as well as that of prisoner, though it was clear by his newly aggressive behavior that he was also telling the Professor that this new life of bourgeois ease and reflection had little intrinsic charm or value, and could never compare to the unique high culture from which he had been forced to flee.