Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The Professor inquired as to what he should do.

“Mind the dogs,” Catspaw said only, as he stuffed his ears with moss. He felt underwater in this new alertness, as vivid remembrances sprang forth: the schoolmaster putting a thermometer in his mouth in a musty classroom, his first fall from a horse, a village church burning down, a corridor of lime trees, his mother’s freckled arm encircling his neck, his father’s drooping lower lip after his stroke. . and then he was aware of an intoxicating and unfamiliar perfume — conifers, acacia, lupines? No, none of those, but some combination of human, animal, and herbs. He was about to fire when he took one last look through the glasses. It was Ainoha at furious gallop on a sweat-streaked Moccus, carrying a torch and rising in the stirrups German-style, led by old Sirius, still our best tracker. Her knees were bare, and her flowing skirts were kirtled up about her waist.

As the dazed sleepers roused themselves in confused welcome, Moccus snorted through his vibrating nostrils, then stamped about, foam dripping from his teeth. His musculature seemed hammered metal, his bulging eyes like stone. All the animals, even the oxen, were respectful of his entrance.

Ainoha, just come from a dinner party, was attired in a white empire dress of astonishing boldness, its transparent white muslin leaving her bosom bare. She rode barefoot on a tight pea-yellow English saddle, and rather than a crop, an ivory fan pierced with emeralds hung from the wrist of her long white gloves. She was paler than usual, a trace of childlike obstinacy below her regal coiffure.

Father, uncharacteristically dumbstruck, reached up to swing her down from the saddle. But she simply handed him a violet telegram, like a good adjutant. It had been delivered during dinner by a particularly officious but weary messenger. As it was in Russian, she couldn’t decipher it, and thought it urgent to get it to Father. Messages from the East, infrequent as they were, generally were of momentous importance, and she knew his trips into the Marches had a way of stretching into weeks. Father kissed her hand as he tore open the envelope. But it was not even from Petersburg, and far more startling, was addressed to Master Seth Sylvius Gubik. It was an invitation from the rector of the Moscow Conservatory for a scholarship audition. A second-class rail ticket would be awaiting him at the Chorgo Station to be claimed within a fortnight. Father began to translate the telegram for Gubik, but the boy snatched it from his hand, saying, “I can make out Cyrillic.” Then he read it aloud to the astounded manège gathered in the Marches, opening his bloodless mouth in a terrible smile, revealing carious chipped teeth, his gold fillings sparkling in the firelight.

This harmless missive quite out of the blue, which no one, even Gubik, it seemed, had any inkling of, precipitated the most perfunctory conversation and threw the routines of encampment into disarray. Even the sunrise seemed reluctant and uncoordinated. After sour bread and burned coffee it was decided that the family should return at once to Semper Vero, and it fell to me to accompany the Professor back to the border, and if no Skopje were available, thence to Sare — taking care not to run the horses home.

I had always been instructed not to engage the Professor in conversation unless he initiated it, so that he might have the opportunity to reflect upon the object lessons of the day. He rarely said a word to me in those days, but that was partially due to the fact that the actual landscape, which theretofore had only been a backdrop in the press of canine lore or literary analogy, was gradually becoming visible, even startling to him. I realized that this was the first time he had experienced the landscape of Klavier without a dog in it.

The ancients saw the Marchlands as a “nightland,” not properly sea or air, but somehow unromantically concocted from those elements. Their suspension was not easy to walk on, and though well-watered, impossible to navigate by sail, oar, or boathook — only during shallow floods caused by high winds were they accessible. Their only architectural feature were lighthouses, built by the Astingi apparently out of contrariness — for why should only the sea have lighthouses? — though no one could recall seeing one lit. The plain was technically not swamp, steppe, or desert, but, commingling the three, an anomaly of neither volcanic nor oceanic origin, never forested, where no shrub or tree larger than a man would grow. Indeed, nothing taller than a man could exist there; even the fallow deer and wild ponies were of shoulder-height, along with darting, bite-size birds, tiny fingernail butterflies, and dwarf scooting rabbits no bigger than a rat — though a dozen skewered on a spit over an open fire could be the high point of a lifetime. The herds of diminutive and nonthreatening ostriches, llamas, and camels introduced by Grandfather Priam in his Noah phase thrived in the Marchia; a place, in short, where human scale was finally oppressive and where, like heaven, visitors invariably remarked upon the shortness of the grass. This no-man’s-land had been subdivided into lots in the seventeenth century on the premise that the velocity of the trade route would create another boomtown. Yet for three hundred years no one had bought so much as a sliver. One could not project a plan upon it. Nor could one imagine improvements upon it, any more than divine its history. It was the lord’s own subdivision, the infrastructure intact, your basic shrubbery in a grid of lots and no demand. For a man on the run there was no place to hide, for a man with a plan there was no one to take him up on it. It was a province of the utmost idleness and carelessness, where procreation itself was initiated by a slight nervousness or boredom. Even the railway had skirted the area, preferring through some combination of engineering perversity and convict labor to be built upon cedar pilings.

Always lush with grass and underlain by an enormous aquifer just under the surface, not so much as a trickle of a stream crossed the Marches. Yet water was everywhere, just beneath a network of roofless limestone and coral caverns studded with opals, complicated as a neuron. It had neither hillock nor true swamp, forest copse or declivity of any kind, and for that matter, not even a single rock for miles. The terrain absorbed our common violent storms effortlessly, yet its huge filter was so packed with moisture it would not burn, and thus was abandoned reluctantly even by the prehistorical personality.

Unlike its sister steppe, its soil would grow anything you put into it with absolutely no care, but never at a rate of growth acceptable to modern agriculture. If ploughed it would become cloddy and slick; to fertilizer it was vaguely indifferent. The peculiar lime-green grass was so elastic that it defied the scythe and clogged the mechanical hayrack. It produced no minable minerals, yet the soil was so fully nutrient that it was toxic to domesticated animals. Entire herds perished, falling over with a collective sigh in a heap, poisoned systemically by a sudden overdose of trace elements. Wildlife, however, continued to thrive. It supported more species than any other part of Europe, as their reduced size was disdained by royal hunting parties. Spared the atrocities of agriculture as well as the euphemistic and even more destructive “hunting and gathering,” it was a place to picnic and loll, and to carry out one’s little experiment; and above all to sharpen one’s eye. It had its own ecological integrity, for the Astingi believed that whatever or whoever you killed in the Marches was doing someone else a favor.

In our family album there were photos of ladies in sailor suits and parasols stooping for an extinct wildflower in the Marches; aunts masquerading as young girls with pigtails and flowered aprons seated in a horizonless rectangle of air, a clutch of newborn goslings in their laps; a mysterious woman in a striped double-breasted suit and straw hat, standing with her easel in the scrub with no subject it seemed, conveying only the aura of a stylish woman with time on her hands. There were photos of Grandfather standing in a black fedora and velvet cape, his back always turned to the camera. Every scene with him was exactly two-thirds sky, flecked with enormous glandular cumulus, and one-third muddy ground. A hazy uneven horizon implied the fluvial course of a river in the distance, but was in fact only the road to the ferry, a seam of top-heavy poplars and goiterlike topiary shaped by the absence of any care. My caped grandfather never looked out to the horizon, but always gazed toward the ground, at the faint trace of an old wagon wheel rut, which, creasing the strange wide-bladed grass, soon disappeared from sight. It was kind of a farmer’s field, or rather a rough sketch of one, as if a full crop of sweetgrass had been pulled from some edenic meadow, transported to this plain, and carelessly transplanted in irregular tufts, dried and scrofulous.