Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The Professor suddenly seemed to recover his balance and his dignity. “You know, my friend, how much I envy you in such matters. I would give anything to be in your circumstances. But while my experience is more limited and unlucky, I often deal with women who are not part of your ideal animal kingdom. Allow me to suggest that your good fortune may multiply itself toward too much of a good thing.”

Genuinely moved, Felix took a step backward.

“I feel the gaze of racial disapprobation,” he said haltingly, “almost as if you were putting a curse on me.”

The Professor tried not to smirk. “I say this only, Councilor: women can be woe, and falling in love can be the ruin of a man.”

“Oh, come now, Professor, I have loved every part of every woman since I was eleven. Even the Furies are rather cute, you must admit. One is nothing if not rooted in a woman’s heart.”

The Professor knew he was in no position to proffer more advice. “I’m no artist at this sort of thing, believe me,” he sighed. “I seem to be obsessed by how small a normal favor in such a normal place might change my life.”

My father turned back to the house, not in anger, but with a definite military movement. “You do not have to be normal to infer from the normal, my friend. As you have pointed out many times yourself, it’s uncanny, isn’t it, just how small, how tiny, the normal is.”

The Professor cried out after him despairingly, “And nondescript!”

Halfway up the stairs Father turned. “We are Cannonians, sir! We waste a good deal of time over little things, and argue them to death. You have brought me, in my wasteland, examples of both perfect acculturation and uncomplicated desire, a veritable spectrum of New Thoughters and Modern Miasmas, and it isn’t fair merely to berate you for it. But you won’t get a prize for today’s collection of proverbs, I can tell you that.”

Mother had come outside for the farewells. As the men separated, one going up and one down the stairs, she noted that Drusoc’s mistress was carrying one of the Professor’s manuscripts. I extended my fabulous earshot.

“I see you are reading a sad story,” Mother said sympathetically to the now less-than-august lady, though privately she wondered how you could sleep with a man with such bad handwriting.

“What would you do if you were me?” the lady said helplessly, stripped of her schmerz und lust . “It is wearing me out, but what can I do?”

“The next time you visit, you must read with me sitting by the river. And then, perhaps, we should all take a long, cold swim.”

“Oh, I should very much like that,” the lady said, and her face changed for the first time from voluptuousness to a kind of wizened wisdom, just as a harsh staccato bird call fell from the wall of mountains.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Even the ravens are laughing at us.”

“No, my dear, they are just laughing in general,” Mother purred. “It’s that time of day. Incidentally, do you find it difficult, as I do, to remember what you read?”

“Oh, indeed. Even what I believe slips away.”

“Do you think one can carry culture without being an intellectual?” Mother wondered out loud, glancing modestly away.

“I believe I know what you mean, but I. .”

“When I was a very young girl,” Mother went on, seemingly talking only to herself, “we used to gather musk roses in the forest, staggering home with huge armfuls. By the time we reached the house we had dropped almost every one. But to have all our lost possessions again, we had only to smell our hands.”

It was a melancholy dusk, but one without evident bitterness. The men embraced. The women shook hands. The carriage lurched haltingly away. Mother had packed a dinner for them in a basket, and Father fitted it out with ferns and mushrooms, as well as a few shafts of barnyard hay, in which the unpitiable Drusoc made a halfhearted nest. They had telegraphed ahead. The Auberge L’Espérance , an inn of passable noodles and occasional dancing, where the streetlights look like trees and the trees look like table lamps, produced a vacancy.

“Perhaps she is a communist?” Mother opined hopefully, as if somehow this would defuse or explain the situation.

My father had buried his face in his hands.

“This cannot go on,” he murmured. “I have seriously miscalculated. We must look for another line of work.”

She was tenderer then with him than I ever saw her, as well-affected as with a pup. She raised up his black face and kissed it all over, the cheeks, temples, and eyes.

“If we have no choice but to expose ourselves to the general public,” she said, “we must be prepared to meet them on their own terms.”

Father mulled this over silently, reveling in this rare display of girlish affection. “But that animal,” he said hoarsely, “that animal !” It was not clear to which of our three visitors he was referring. Then suddenly he reached down, and snatching a clump of violets from the lawn, crushed them against his nostrils to expunge the encounter.

By the sideways motion of the carriage, it was apparent our guests were arguing, and as they disappeared into a caul of thunderheads, I thought I could see that grunted gongword, uck , float up and out into the empty theater of the Marchlands.

What manner of man was this boy who fled a Cannonia in flames? Merely the greatest spy of our closed, sad century, which has been very good to dedicated, cultured, and incorruptible spies. A true triple agent, a man of a thousand twists, Iulus had burrowed deep in the bowels of the latterly failed intelligence agencies of both East and West, but was finally loyal only to his own dubious, ridiculous, failed state. He hid his fear of the Communists behind a mask of contempt, and hid his contempt for America behind a mask of acquiescence; a triple bluff. For in truth, a spy’s essentiality is this — a dedication to forever escaping the clichés of one’s contemporaries. And, after all, who can you trust, if not such a spy?

An agent’s greatness is tested only when his most precocious and accurate observations are disbelieved at the highest levels, and for the greater part of his career no one on either side accepted his essential brief — that both Russia and America, despite their windy rhetoric and vast armadas, were too big, too messianic, and too politically immature to do anything but culturally bankrupt one another — two pitiful helpless giants, who would eventually fall weeping and wailing into each other’s ghostly arms.

There is a Cannonian fairy tale concerning a wolf hunt in which the dark beast is finally cornered in its lair, and at the last moment of a titanic struggle, the tortured and stunned animal leaps up, and putting his paws upon the hunter’s chest, implores him in the strangely lilting voice of the eternally feminine, “to try and understand him.” “And this,” goes the refrain which so often ends their tales, “is how you are going to live the second half of your life. The losers have lost, but the winners have not won.”

Although he would be the first to deny it, the records show that Coriolan Iulus Pzalmanazar was born in County Klavier of Cannonia in 1924, just outside the town of Silbürsmerze, an ancient silver-beating town of steep roofs, tidy public gardens, and an inn where the young philanderer, Goethe, had once spent a night. After dinner, when he believed his black poodle Pregestiar to be insulted, the poet precipitated a drunken brawl. Later in the lock-up, he justified his outburst on “feeling hemmed in by space, causality and time,” setting a precedent for intellectuals ever since in blaming bad behavior on cosmic abstractions.