Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

As the road suddenly became nothing more than a cart track, one could make out in the failing light the town of Silbürsmerze, taking its name from the glistening carmine and tarnished silver heath which surrounded it. It hung suspended like a faint etching between blowzy curtains of protective mists, the sort of scene you wanted to rub up against to see if the color would come off. We forded the shallows of the Vah across a great sheath of granite, and as we approached, the town enfolded upon itself, like the mighty tribulations of a rose in a second, slightly desperate bloom. Unfamiliar as it was, I could not help but marvel at the peace it yielded, a town that was still connected with our dreams, the dreams we know are dreams while we are dreaming them and thus effect no fear. For we all walk the ramparts and narrow streets of a town very much like Silbürsmerze, coils of royal blue smoke from peat and fodder fires hovering on her outskirts, where heartbreak remains an aura but is not yet adumbrated, a place where melancholy still gives us character but has yet to become garrulous. Ah, Silbürsmerze: always veering towards sentimentality, but never quite making it.

At the very center of town we entered an amazingly severe, asymmetrical seventeenth-century square, completely arcaded, continuously vaulted, all friezes, alcoves, and spandrels; curdled tympanas, curved archivolts, and gables with crockets; constructed of molded colored bricks so that not a single square inch was the same color. At the north corner stood a church with a covered double-stair and two towers, one of five rectangles and three domes, the other a Saxon clock tower with an Astingi inscription which Iulus translated as “Each hour dooms Man, the last one kills him.” Squatting down in that off-center square, one had the distinct impression of a sealed, impermeable environ, a kind of conservative utopia, but a short walk to any of its corners revealed a narrow street, lane, or worn stair; Silbürsmerze was all exits. And there was nothing at its center, no statue, bell, or well, nothing but an irregular patch of diseased lawn with a low deteriorating stone wall about it.

“Be still,” Iulus whispered, “there are a thousand eyes upon us,” and it dawned on me that my interlocutor was the only human figure I had seen since my arrival. The only sound in the square was the strange hesitant clop clop of manual typewriters, hunting and pecking like a hobbled horse echoing across cobbled courtyards. Despite the absence of people, it seemed a place where no one ever died.

We sat there on the low stone wall for nearly an hour, buffeted by gusts of wind like the exhalations of an excited woman. My sense of mission was growing ever fainter. More than once I turned to my host with some wide-eyed authentic question, but then thought the better of it. The silent depths of that hour in the square, and something in his patient manner, canceled out the earnest gradegrubbing student in me forever.

Suddenly Iulus clapped his hands to his knees, as if he just remembered something, and ushered me into a half-timbered building with clerestory windows. Loping through an arcaded inner courtyard with a barbarian penile millstone displayed at its center, he went directly to a vaulted basement lit with window wells, an enormous room with Spanish studded leather walls and a black and red marble Moorish fireplace, which in palmier days had served as the town mint. The walls were hung with hundreds of hunting trophies, upon each of which was draped freshly killed game — live meat air-dried upon embalmed meat. From every cornice antlered heads stared with glassy eyes, snipey noses, and erect ears, the tissues of their half-open mouths painted a flamingo pink, maws coated with resin. From these obdurate horns and glistening snouts, from the long faces of forest animals, dangled the marbled membranous cuts of their fellow species — ribs, shoulders, and tenderloins; chops, briskets, and roasts; sausages, organ systems, and scaloppini; intricately carved carcasses, filleted silhouettes of musculature, the missing domesticated relatives’ bodies beautifully butchered and appended to the head of their species’ wild prototype. Haunch of stag venison, loins of flushed forest pig, crown roast of fetal lamb, livers dangling in a small silken net from the tail feathers of a cock pheasant in flight; rigid purple skinned hindquarters of rabbit straddling the figure of a stuffed dancing hare. It was as if the ark itself had foundered and sunk, turned upside down in the shallows, disgorging its drowned and butchered cargo of carcasses into eddies of diffused light. And we floated through this haphazard catalogue of delicacies like calm and purposeful sharks. The folk of Silbürsmerze had been through quite a bit, but it was evident that they would never starve.

At the very center of this hygienic and anatomically correct abattoir was a blue and white enameled metallic box, the size of a small treasure chest, glowing with a strange out-of-place sanctity, and surrounded by a few landmines with the earth still fresh upon them. Stenciled on the top was the logo “LIBERTY PURE LARD (Roberts & Oake, Chicago, USA).” It had been dropped from an American airplane, killing a shepherd, and they had not been able to identify a single item in it. Inside, along with condensed milk, concentrated orange juice, Cheerios, Mars bars, baked beans, Spam, and soya curds, were several five-pound packages of margarine in plastic globes, a bullet-sized nodule of coloring embedded at each center.

As I was about to explain the meaning of this gift, Iulus wrestled a hindquarter down from the nose of a particularly proud elk, cut a large chunk from the gelatinous pink mass, and pinning the meat to the table with a knife nearly as large as a sabre, detached the heart of the loin. Then he took a smaller knife from his boot and began to mince the loin with a flurry of strokes. Soon there was a pile of maroon shavings, and he wrapped these in old yellowed newspapers which announced the Russian victory at Kursk, an international congress on physiology in Leningrad held in spite of the siege, and the lead piece, a dog show in Silbürsmerze, noting that the number of entrants was the lowest since the flu epidemic of 1919.

We put the meat and select items from Chicago in a rucksack, clicked our heels together, put our voices well back in the larynx, shot up our forearms, and with a merciless ironic giggle (which I then believed to be an entirely new form of humor) goose-stepped out of the Meat Museum and reentered the square, which now seemed darker and more claustrophobic than the cellar. Crossing to an elliptical corner, a dark lane at once opened up, and as we left the square it transformed itself back into a trapezoid.

The houses leaned in upon us, insisting, as with everything else in the country, upon their own manner of collapsing. I was losing both my concentration and curiosity, crushed by the thought of the numberless exhibits I had not yet seen. But my guide had an exquisite sense of these matters, and a clap on the shoulder indicated that our general orientation was about to be concluded. We had indeed come upon a rather astonishing detached house in a relatively new suburban quarter. As was common with Cannonian bourgeois townhomes of the inter-war period, the small front yard was adorned with busts of the resident family — Mother, Father, and two daughters in this case. The sculptor had given each of them the same expression of tranquil pride with a trace of sarcasm.

The house was of three stories — gray limestone, green majolica tile, and terracotta successively — topped off with a copper mansard roof in which were set two rows of false arches. All this was surmounted by a domed cupola with an open window, from which at this very moment, chin out, tail elevated, and legs tucked expertly beneath him, a red dog leapt into space. A geyser of water erupted from the courtyard as the animal plunged some sixty feet into a raised pool. As we drew nearer, I was aware only of the circular pool, exploding every few moments with another spume, flashes of red fur hurtling across a plum sky, a curved double staircase leading up to flung-open French doors fluttering with torn lace drapes. The first dog who leapt had by now paddled up to the fluted edge of the pool, his bushy muzzle plastered slick as an otter’s, the nails of his forepaws glistening as he hauled himself from the water. He shook himself into a convulsion which began in his jaws and ended with a crack of his tail as an aureole of mist rainbowed about him. As he sat shaking, I was aware of another shape cannonading into the pool behind him, another dashing across the drive spewing gravel in all directions, another taking the staircase in three powerful bounds, the front and rear paws crossing one another at the peak of the gallop, another disappearing through the French doors, another ascending the interior spiral staircase without breaking stride, and yet another bursting from the cupola without a moment’s hesitation, launched into the darkening air in the noblest of freefall frozen poses, until he too galooped into a geyser of white foam.