Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

January 1947, sold as scrap to Cannonia, disassembled, transferred via the Rhine to Frankfurt-am-Main, thence via the Ludwig Canal to Froim-onthe-Hron, there by lorry to the Gulo Orphanage and Ironworks near Belta Bella. Reassembled, refitted, and recommissioned as Anti-Drakon (K-666), put into transatlantic service from Turdes, Albania to Mt. Desert, Maine by the Cannonian Foreign ministry. Sighted by U.S. Coast Guard, spilling oil off Newfoundland, 1952, 1956, 1968, 1975, 1981, 1984, reported lost in underwater collision in the Sea of Azov.

1989, reappeared in Therepia, refitted, and recommissioned as the Clara Schumann , a tourist craft for trendy youth, plying the straightened oxbows of the Mze.

Of all country things, the Professor was fondest of camping, sleeping outside under the grave stars with stories round the fire. We hitched up the oxen to the open wagon, filled its gunnels with hampers of fresh food, blue bottles of seltzer, dark brown bottles of beer, a great pile of feather comforters, some Turkish army tents, and tarpaulins of fleece. Then all of us save Ainoha pushed westward a few miles, horses and dogs running free beside, until we were quite alone in Klavierland, except for the herds of aurochs who stared at the oxen as though they were deformed. Given the slowness of our entourage, which included many of the servants, and the muddy banks exposed by a detumescent Mze (which in our part of the country often changed directions at the whim of its dead, diverted, underground cousins, sometimes flowing east and sometimes west; Father claimed to be able to determine the direction by smell), it was decided to take the ferry at the Sare landing, above Reil Island, where it was said the ashes of Achilles and Patroclus mingled with those of Helen and Ajax.

The ferryman’s house was a Lilliputian villa with whimsical bays and gables, and when the hunting horn sounded, his wife emerged at once, accompanied by a rooster. She raised a pennant on the ferry as we boarded, and by tightening a pulley against a taut wire beneath the water, let the current draw us across. The rooster perched upon the rudder, his lurid Bersaglieri tail feathers fluttering in the breeze. As the ferry nudged the far bank, he strutted over to Father, accepted the half-florin toll in his beak, and returned it to his jolly mistress. Then, transporting our vie de chateaux , we proceeded northwesterly into the land of no roads, no inns, no fables, and no police. It may have been the most bourgeois of caravans, but I felt as one with the Astingi, volleying a hail of arrows into the sun as they swarmed the Aurelian walls.

In the evening Father selected an islet of silver poplars and twisted cork oak, and in no time he was cubing the meat and slicing the potatoes into an iron pot suspended from a tripod. Father presided over goulash, Catspaw received the task of tethering the horses and clean-up, and the Professor was assigned to keep his eye on whatever dogs were to be spoilt that day. He had by this time learned to turn them with a single shout.

We spread the sheepskins around the fire as the sun stopped short and finally fell away. No one missed it. As the fog rolled in, the goulash was ladled out into metal bowls, stippled tin wirled with green, brown, and white, and then the call went up for stories.

Seth Silvius Gubik, in addition to his other talents, was also quite a raconteur, with the terrible ability to sum up a life in a phrase. His stories were transliterated from the flutter of his deaf and dumb Astingi mother’s hands, dead stories recounted discontinuously as he searched for words to match her recalled sign language, halting mid-sentence as if he were a painter cleaning his brush before each stroke. This stammering only added a sincere affect. Gubik was otherwise a totally quiet boy, diffident even, but in the midst of these cacographically related tales he was most fully composed. True, they never came out quite the same way twice, which of course only added to their reality. No one thought this contradictory or a subject upon which to build a world philosophy. He had the perfect audience, for we all took joy in hearing myths exploded and religious themes flattened out of existence, and the long pauses, the aphonia of his delivery, made you feel that you had somehow made it up yourself.

At first he did not get on with the Professor, being the sort of wise child whom adults consult without condescension. They tried to be sarcastic about it (“And what do you think of this, eh, Master Gubik?”) but surprised themselves by at bottom being sincere. The Professor was often angry that the stories never made a clear point. Their legendary unity was often scrapped entirely, or relegated to a kind of background noise.

Gubik’s manner of telling was so unaffected that one could not object to even the most bizarre relation of fact, and so seamless that one could not interject, though there were certainly sufficient intervals to do so. Nor did he seem particularly invested personally in his tales. He neither dismissed objections nor tried to refute them. He refused to professionalize himself. There was in his manner a wide-eyed incredulity, as if he were passing along something so obvious that one should really not make too much of it. In short, the Professor had to question the entire enterprise in order to participate in it, but found himself relocating all his queries onto hopelessly abstract grounds. Gubik listened attentively with a slight smirk, not of certitude exactly, but secure in knowing that while the game had been removed temporarily from his stadium, it would gradually find its way back. It was clear, nevertheless, that he sometimes incorporated objections to his stories in later versions. The Professor rightly saw this as the most hurtful kind of rejection, like a dog who sits before you politely, with all the earmarks of alertness and respect, but simply does not come. There was no lofty singing from this precocious boy. He didn’t know a strophe from an antistrophe, and he was on principle against the chant.

“An unshorn dog story, then!” the Professor cried out, as Father ladled more goulash into the bowls.

“Which one?” Gubik answered. “Found by dogs, suckled by dogs, led by dogs, or torn apart by dogs?”

“Whatever you wish. Whatever comes to mind,” the Professor said with an earnest grin.

Gubik held his bowl with both hands, slurping slowly, and we all followed the bobbing of his head. “So then,” he began as always, licking his lips slowly and batting his gray eyes, “from the dogs of the God Actaeon, I think, or perhaps it was Cromises the river god. . In any case, a certain god in a certain grove had a pack of dogs, and from the finest of these he created a mysterious race of men and women, the Telechines, to fill the gap in the hierarchy between artisans and magicians. And unto them he gave a golden dog, a statue to remind them of their origins, and another sort of hellhound to stand upon the mountain and guard them, a dog with many heads, some say three.”

“Hesiod mentions fifty,” the Professor interrupted drily.

Gubik went on, pleased as always to be interrupted.

“This hound guarded the way to the cave of death, letting anyone pass who wished, but allowing no one out. The golden idol was beautiful, but cold and stationary. The guard dog was hideous but alive. On this golden dog the Telechines could lay out all their complaints and praise, all their poems and lies, and the golden dog was. . mercifully silent.”

Gubik smiled slightly and measured us. “The golden dog gave birth to a piece of wood, which was planted and became. . a vine? The many-headed dog gave birth to serpents, vermin, and fish. The horse mackerel, the sea sheep, the late-dying prepon who wiggles for hours even when cut in pieces, the clearch who takes his sleep outside the sea, the nimble, tumbling gobi, and the savage race of sea-mice, the crooked pouple. .”