Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The animal’s bodies lurched on a centrifugal plane like dervishes, and as they neared us, rather than stopping, they took on the masters (Rubato attending the Hauptzuchtwart, Nimbus the stranger) with a sudden upward lunge, snapping at the men’s faces as if to bite their noses off. The Professor had already recoiled, but as the jaws of Nimbus passed by his head, she planted a floating air-kiss on his lips, half-tenderly, half-mischievously, beslobbering his defensive, outthrust arm. Then began the dance of welcome and salutation — prodigious waggings of hindquarters, violent tugs of muscles, rapid tramplings, daring vaults, annular contractions, far-flung leaps, and the indubitable claw-flamenco.

Their cut tails were vibrating to quick-time, their rosy riffled mouths exposed. Then Father quietly spoke their favorite words—“ Ru-ba-to, Nimbus ”—and with a single leap they were at his side, shoulder blades against his shinbones like statues, each with a white whorl on its chest. Father put them in a double-harness, and without another word we set off for the forest where the juiciest ferns grow thick and the deer congregate to escape the midday heat. The birds stopped singing.

Our forests were not the true trackless type, the only true remnants of which exist in northern Russia and northmost America, but in fact were leafy islands cut from fields to shield the springs and water sources. Before the Great War you could move a thousand kilometers east and rarely be a hundred yards from drinking water, and by carefully picking its portages across the sterile fields, a full column of horsemen could remain in shade for days at a time. The emphasis had always been to extract game from the brutal and never bucolic forms of agriculture, circumventing those bound to the garner of the land — a never-ending battle to wrest trees from the peasant’s poaching axe and the magnate’s long saw.

“Ah, to live in harmony with the land,” the Professor let slip as he picked his way about the cowpats.

“Stand for a day with a shepherd dog, my friend,” Felix riposted, “and we shall see what becomes of your mind. You could turn all the Germanies into a gymnasium and not restore it. For a landscape to have grandeur, it must have a bit of nonsense.”

Then he discoursed on why nature is anything but natural:

“One must work incessantly so that the landscape is neither diminished nor allowed to revert to uncontrolled growth. A constructive edge which is not impenetrable but in which one can hide takes many men to create, many lifetimes, many tricks and sacrifices, so that you can get close to a bird who has survived all history with the latecomer, the dog, who it took eight thousand years to train just to eat out of his own dish.”

Father had this theory, as far as I know unrefuted, that every nation takes the structure of its mind from the nature of its forest, whether it be the diagonal rows of the French bocage and its filtered crystalline light, making the informal formal; the dense darkness of the Teuton wood, where the trees die top down and the canopy seems made of gnarled roots; the ever-correct English copses, memorial to the vanished forest of thieves and adventurers; or the single druidical cypress worshiped by Mediterraneans — as well as those ancient civilizations where the austerity of intellect is apparently the result of having no trees at all, but only unaesthetical shrubbery, not to speak of jungles where rarity is homogeneity; the Russian taiga of birch, pine, and rowan whose inwardness is so palpable and passive; and finally the American backwoods, the richest botanically but the most slovenly kept, its most prominent feature stumps, which exist chiefly to hide broken, discarded toys — toys, they say, made of everything but wood.

The woods in our part of the world corresponded well to the human state for which they were intended: islands of secrecy, preserved from the snip, snip, snip of agricultural routine. Not even centuries of war could destroy these covens, though one man within his lifetime, in the interest of a few handfuls of grain or kindling, could do more damage than the most violent of autocratic contests. And the Professor, because he knew that animals returned to die there, misunderstood these patches of woods as dark places inhabited by goblins and other terrible forces, whereas in reality, as Father patiently explained, they were full of disappointments and surprises, but not to be feared, because men don’t die there.

“We die out in the open,” he murmured as if in a trance, “when we forsake cover, out in the plain geometry of our own devising, making those banal rows of sweet little pods just like a cemetery. When the earth is pulverized and floats away with the rain and the green lines of mesmeric shoots appear, that’s when men must take cover, for it is in the spring when he begins to hallucinate at his own handiwork and builds his grave of vegetables.” It was the fields, not the woods, where the human experiment was out of control, and that was the delicate point he was prepared to enforce that day.

When rhetorically upstaged, the Professor would often opt for a kind of radical response, in this case arguing that hunting was an outdated ritual to appease one’s vanity, an attempt to reconnect “bourgeois thinking” with its nobler antecedents, and “a stupid contest to determine who was the manliest man in all Klavierland.” But Felix disarmed him with selective candor.

“What you say is true enough,” he said, “yet ninety-nine percent of our existence has been spent doing just that. I do not pretend to live in harmony with the land; the point is to distance oneself gradually from it, to make it an object of curiosity and pleasure. It’s woods alone that are worth hoodwinking for, my dear Hebraist; nevertheless, we take your point. And now, if you will, attend to mine.”

The day was bright for my father’s display, as always prodigal but without fanfare. Rubato and Nimbus were released but made not the slightest lunge as the leash was uncoupled. They followed him two meters off each of his heels, watching the telltale arch of his booted foot, trading for the time being their poor eyes for his superior vantage, height, and peripheral vision. Climbing the embankment of a drainage ditch, the Professor already panting, we appeared on a stubbled rise and overlooked a field of wheat bordered at its furthest reach by what seemed an incommensurably dense line of forest. It was mostly ash, if a name tells you anything, a crippled bit of nature with billows of vegetation cascading about gnarled boles, a profusion of wild vines which reached to the very top of the trees and turned black in the winter, hard as barbed wire.

Father’s right heel raised slightly, the precondition for firing, though he carried no gun — all he had to do was show the dogs the key to the gun cabinet for them to know the direction of the day. When his heel reached half an inch off the ground, Rubato and Nimbus dropped to their bellies, arched their necks, and cocked their heads ever so slightly in order to peer calmly around his calves. The Professor’s eyes had a hint of gray awe. My father spoke slowly, cradling his imaginary, redundant gun:

“This is the opposite of suggestion, but an exercise in cooperation, reinforcing our worst senses with the best of others. The point is to define what is in reach and beyond reach, and gradually, with luck, to push back the confines of the inaccessible. That’s the part of the story which is always missed.”

As he spoke, he bent slightly at the knees, and with a single wave of his hand, the dogs sprang up and plunged in tandem into the sea of green wheat.

“As pure athletes they are the best that ever lived,” he went on. “They lack some of the nostalgic virtues, perhaps, but no one ever moved with such alacrity.”