Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Now their noses were my father’s eyes. The Chetvorah knifed through the grain at full speed, his eyes following their skulls. The vast field for them became a simple frame which they divided into quadrants, galloping across each other’s black wakes in the green ocean, turning figure-eights like torpedo boats. Every few moments they leapt straight up to check their bearings, and while suspended in midair, with a slight coy turning of their heads caught the angle of my father’s hands, which cast them out further along vectors of his composing. He disdained the human voice and all the apparatus of verbs, horns, whistles, and thunder-clubs, and in this way, without a mote of wasted energy, mapped the sea of grass until the Chetvorah had fully quartered it, drinking everything in.

The Professor watched this, squinted, bunching his shoulders, and let out a long sigh as the dogs reached the forest line without putting up a single bird. Then, wheeling in circles of disappointment, their purpose waning, they began to work their way back to us in desuetude.

“Birds don’t eat lunch,” Father said by way of explanation, “but deer do,” and then, shaping his hands into a great parentheses, framed the final scene for the Professor. “Watch this well and with respect.”

His hands flicked out, all ten fingers, and the dogs, caught short, turned volte face and began to work the forest edge, though one could sense the momentum had been broken, a few of the invisible threads between us snapped by the stress of an elegant search gone unrewarded. An element of hesitation, even boredom, was apparent in their gait even to an untrained observer. Nevertheless they kept working the edge in tandem, throwing up divots of earth in their indignation, and then their perfect figure-eights began to oscillate as one of them — Rubato, I thought — veered off at a tangent, ears flapping, in the kind of heavy, jazzy canter of a horse broken from its traces, or a duck breaking formation with a few pellets in its wing. With one ear carelessly turned inside out, he loped obliquely, hindlegs moving somewhat to the side, as some tremendous emotion began to seize him. Every nerve taut, one foreleg and one hindleg paused in the air, he peered with cocked head into the hollows as the flaps of his erected ears fell forward on both eyes. Nimbus backed him with fine deliberation, her bobbed tail waving furiously, both drunk with their own identity. Rubato wobbled left and right, then started, which jerked his head in rash recoil against his chest and in recovering almost tore his head from his shoulders. The spore of the deer had floated from the forest and dropped like a regimental flag before them.

“Now there is only one chance left, very small,” Father whispered, still holding his cupped and inverted palms before the Professor’s glistening face. “We will see if Rubato has it in him to self-correct.”

Nimbus was still locked in the semblance of a pattern, wheeling through the conflicting signals, walking the edge, and still vaguely aware that my father’s hands could reach her. But then with a shudder she broke off, not to the deer — a furtive stag with a broken rack and yellowish-white scut which had just broken from the thicket — but to her runaway brother’s trail. The dogs accelerated now faster than ever, a breakneck berserker pace, and disappeared into the forest, galloping with teeth set and howling inwardly.

The parentheses of my father’s hands closed, as if to wring the last, long, soft note out. The view became bright and empty, the fields desolate.

“They’re demons now,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Their sordid history has overtaken them.”

“Call them!” the Professor cried out, wringing his hands. It was like the cry of a woman who has been told her husband is dead. “Call them back!”

Father called out their names in a high, clear voice, more to comfort his friend than anything. Then he blew on the horn of bone and finally the steel whistle, an ear-splitting military pitch of the last resort, though he knew better. On the overgrazed hill beyond the forest, we could make out the stag lumbering up the slope, pausing every now and then to aim a labored hindquarter kick. And behind him, losing ground like their names, the two spittle-sucking stumblebums in blind pursuit. They disappeared into the hooded Cannonian landscape of uncomprehending beasts and unskillful hunters.

“They’re too far to hear,” the Professor said agonizingly.

“Oh, they hear all right,” my father said, “but it’s just one voice among others now.”

The Professor turned tearfully. “Nothing to be done?”

“Absolutely nothing. It’s not that they have forgotten exactly. They are simply beyond their own faculties. Now we can only pray the stag does not run them into wire, or that some besotted shepherd does not shoot them. And when they come back down the road in a few days, full of burrs, their tongues hanging out like blood sausage, you will notice that your love and concern has been turned to an urge to punish. No, they will not look you in the eye. They will not even come to the house. They will go and beg to be let into the kennel. Remember the scene, Herr Doktor, not the individuals.”

“If we had accompanied them,” the Professor broke out accusatorially, “this would not have happened.”

“Precisely,” my father said calmly and politely. “They reached the end of the field, and seeing themselves in the mirror, like children, they chose to look behind it. But don’t forget, dear friend, just before, the pride of our cooperation! And for all that, remember the field before the forest, before they broke the civilzonnen , where the voluntary reigns. It is almost exactly eighty meters long, sixty wide, and one inch deep, and in my lifetime I have enlarged it by twenty percent! As things get beyond that, sir, we are only custodians. There is no return on capital.” The double harness hung like a gallows rope in his hands. “It’s time for a little lunch, and a bit of oblivion,” he announced without emotion.

As the Professor followed Father into the White Wings, Black Dog, he noted a small, hand-painted sign above the door.

YOU ARE APPROACHING EARTH’S CENTER

IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IT

JUST ENTER

The jolly, almost-too-rosy serving girl waved them back to The Brainery with a butter knife. While all their fellow diners were male, the room itself had an eternally feminine quality. Disdainful of mere prettiness, the colors were sweetly mysterious shades of pale yellow, which unfolded rather than pleased the eye, and the floating draperies blurred the precise lines of the room with profound sensuality. Just as they were seated in a green booth with curtains, a platter of tiny steaming birds, a woodcock fricassee, was brought to the table.

“Served only one week a year,” Father announced with a wink. “If a mouflon is shot in the mountains of Vop, it is brought here; if a fine salmon is hauled from the Augesee, it is packed in ice and brought here; if an especially fine jar of sheep’s milk cheese should appear in Chere Muchore, it is also brought here.”

Then the Professor was amazed to see his host lift up the tablecloth, and placing the platter in front of him, drape the cloth over his head and dish, making a tent so as to fully inhale their woodfern aroma. He did not reappear for fully ten minutes.

While Father was thus preoccupied, the Professor perused the menu, at the top of which was only the motto “Hic Carnem Comedemius.” (“We are not vegetarians here.”) Like a true dog’s dinner, it was divided not into courses or even genres: minced chick soup, larks in crumbles, sandpipers in gondolas, fish sausages, blancmange fritters, quince stew with scarlet jelly, griddlecakes with nut paste and Spanish wine. Marzipan love-flakes, macaroon trifle, refreshing fennel and almond essences, maraschino ices. Cockscombs in pagodas and champagne, turkeys daubed with stewed grapes, stuffed pike and river birds garnished with oysters. Aspic of carp with frog dumplings, calves’ ears stuffed with lamb gizzards, grilled peach stew with aniseed, collapsed yearling boar with creamed eggplant and pomegranate molasses. Oxtongue and asparagus ragout, parboiled artichoke bottoms piled with pounded duck livers. Young rabbits with anchovies, minute cold boned thrushes, salad of oranges, herbs, olives, and marigold petals. Braised doe-shanks glazed with sumac and hazelnuts, thrush pate with cardamom fritters, sheeps’ tongues in curled papers, boiled beef skirts rubbed with saltpeter and stuffed with snipe. Roe tarts with shrimps and partridges in their own juice, chilled eels in dill frockcoats, perch and baby quail patties, bass aghast in green garlic. Marrow fried in crumbs, minced pigeon in cream, pig trotters in milk, marshfed veal rubbed with mint and wild thyme in four stocks, and as a single concession to the French, an omelette au joli coeur .