Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Late in the day, beneath a flotilla of barrage balloons, we could make out the desultory massing of American supplies in the oxbow of the river. Brown Studebaker trucks scurried like she-bears as far as the eye could see. A PX was already going up, and next to the stockade with its California-style barracks for displaced persons, I could make out the outlines of a swimming pool and athletic fields. The Cannonian dusk would soon be filled with flyballs, as America mounted her exhilarating project to prove history wrong.

From the meadow bank, the Astingi peered from their ponies across the tawny river. On the far side, a group of sullen, drunken GIs stripped to the waist were skipping stones (a fact which seemed to startle even my impassive guide), and when a lanky left-hander skipped a pebble some twenty times across the whiskey-colored water, the Astingi vanguard scattered as if they had seen a ghost. Iulus stopped the cart and dismounted, studying the far bank in his binoculars. Then he turned his back and gestured to the lead horseman returning from the river, who seemed to recognize him despite the costumery. He galloped up and they had a brief discussion, speaking a language unlike any I had heard, lyrical but agglutinative, as if every word were a verb, a dactylic canter where each initial syllable set off a platoon of vowels which rushed away like birds after a gunshot, a basso continuo turning every A to O, every O to U, and every U to zero.

The Astingi leader regrouped his advance guard and followed Iulus down to the muddy embankment. My guide stared at the water for some time; then with a brisk but casual motion, he suddenly bent down and caught a trout in his bare hands. When he held it up, the huge half-naked adolescents on the far bank stopped laughing, just as the Astingi troop began. And then as Iulus turned round, putting the fish in a fold of his loose boot, the Astingi began to ford the river with renewed confidence, their faith in superior reflexes restored. They refused to use the bridge, their ponies negotiating the eddies so effortlessly one could not tell if they were actually walking or swimming.

We ourselves crossed the pontoon bridge lodged with the bloated carcasses of many horses and farm animals. I showed the bored MPs my papers, and they waved us into the camp, which we entered as if from another century, another planet, as if from some B-grade movie — two Kulaks in their Sunday best, a horsedrawn hayrick with its smuggled riches — the oldest trick in the book — and one, as it turned out, that was being replicated a thousand times a day along the stopline, each American policeman more credulous or indifferent than the last, as murderers, spies, and thugs by the score took shelter amongst the people who called Heaven their home. We were billeted at the rear of the camp which now stretched across two double oxbows of the Mze. The back office had finally caught up with our advance and was busily collecting information while denying rumors of a last great push to destroy the Soviets in their tracks, which naturally had elicited no great enthusiasm in the ranks. There was no longer any mention of Terra XX.

A crowd of soldiers had already gathered about our cart, more curious about the single mechanical conveyance to survive their artillery barrage intact than our fey costumery, cautiously patting the prehistoric horse who gently nipped back, and cooing like a bunch of schoolgirls over the litter, which had now poked their heads from the straw, ears erect and rumps awhirr. Iulus decided then and there to break up the litter, for they were in that twelfth week of canine life in which the bonding to humans is best transferred.

There was no shortage of volunteers or tears. The new owners allowed their dogtags and serial numbers to be pressed into candlewax seals, and eagerly if laboriously wrote out their home addresses on the enormous violet pages of the leatherbound pedigree book. Then after looking them up and down, as if to match the aristochiens to the acned adolescents who whooped about him, Iulus insisted that they form in ranks while he presented the pups, while reading out their German call names: “Stekel! Federn! Kahane! Silberer! Honegger! Kremzir! Tausker! Schreber! Schrotter!” until he was sure that the new owners could at least half-pronounce them.

“To the victors go the spoils, as they say,” he concluded in suddenly perfect uninflected English, “but don’t forget, gentlemen, I will be watching you. . forever.” The new owners were giggling, but they seemed to recognize his authority even though his outlandish garb was by this time literally falling to pieces. Then he dismissed them with cheerful wave of a hand, and our boys ran off inattentively, the pups frolicking at their heels, and I knew from that day on that my allegiances would grow ever more complicated. And frankly, I was just a bit ashamed of my disguise.

We stashed our gear and retired to our double decker bunks for some well-deserved shut-eye, snoring like grandfathers. I noticed he put the Z-box under his pillow. It was never out of his sight.

In the morning, I took the rucksack down to the company store, where they dutifully inventoried the crown and sent it off with a planeload of other Eurotrash to Fort Knox. They even gave me a receipt: “One Cannonian headpiece — gold alloy, jewels, etc. Condition: fair.”

And then we met with a pert stenographer and a Harvard social scientist with a great deal of hair in his nose and ears for such a young lieutenant.

“Are you Cannonian, or what?” he barked without looking up.

“Ah, I have recently been deprived of that famous charm, meine durchschnittlaucht ” (“your averageness”), Iulus began diffidently, stripped down now to his 1920s tennis flannels. Upon repeated questioning, however, citing his noncombatant privileges, his refrain became something of a mantra. “I was born in Cannonia, province of Klavier, in 1924, the year that Lenin and Wilson died within ten days of each other. So I had a very happy childhood.” And then he pushed a strange, mottled birth certificate across the desk.

Iulus was certainly not into confessing, but neither was he enigmatic or evasive. It was as if with a double sincerity he was testifying that, while he recognized his powers of description were inadequate, he knew that what he knew for a fact would only be misinterpreted. Yet the conversation went on for an hour, with a series of questions that seemed to be a kind of market-testing to quantify at what price point our potential ally might be persuaded to subscribe to the New World Order. Was he a bad man or had he only done bad things? Has the war deepened your understanding of the world in which we live? In what ways has America fallen short of your expectations? Have your personal values changed in any way? The lieutenant fairly hummed the tune of our national false intimacy, which persistently encourages the performer of the moment to drop his dignity. Then came a series of questions that seemed to have to do with securing the pleasures of the ruined aristocracy for peanuts — the whereabouts of servants, winecellars, and lubricious women. “I really like history a lot,” the lieutenant averred, and on these subjects Iulus was more forthcoming, though still cautionary. “Ah, every hillock in Cannonia has a tale of buried treasure, but no one save the Astingi has ever found as much as a sovereign.”

Unaccustomed as he was to being counted among the Master Races, and having freight cars full of high-ranking Nazis to debrief, our Ivy League interlocutor finally declared his loss of interest. He knew where to find us if he needed us, he said. But as often happens in the debriefing business, the body language was more instructive than the conversation. If Iulus mocked the lieutenant’s earnest intensity, the lieutenant, not being a stupid person, also mimicked the shrugs he had noticed in this youth grown old before his time, a non-racial Jewish shrug, registering not secretiveness as much as non-conductivity, the gesture of a gentryman grown weary of his good manners. I realized I was witnessing a kind of bizarre contest; indifference bred versus indifference learned. Iulus, of course, as cursory witness, had the upper hand. But he never pressed his advantage.