Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Any time I felt, as one increasingly did in those years, that the impersonal forces of history were grabbing hold as the hum of the social machinery started to miss, every time I felt such an anxiety, I would ride out to watch those aimless soldiers guarding the unmarked foggy border, pants crumpled around their boots as they eternally sat on their latrines, and be touched by the moments of tender feelings of men lost in the last outpost — soldiers who in the end had become skeptical of every plan and were protected by nothing but the commonplace delicacy of their own displaced credulity, pondering how to refuse the abstract mission which had befallen them without being traitors. And while I come from a long line of noncombatants, never put a stick to my shoulder as a child, never learned with my tongue how to make the sound of a gun, I loved those crumpled, fragile, degarraloused soldiers as much as a man could love another human being. Parades never did a thing for me, and serried ranks assembled brings up in my gorge only the great graph of Napoleon’s four hundred thousand setting out from the Marchlands to Russia, and returning in the cold with less than ten thousand men, marching without fear and hope.

Those guard-stations at the gates were more full of life than any art I ever saw, more beautiful than ballerinas. Common soldiers no longer brave, no longer lads, not prideful yet gay, covered with scabs and lice, pay in arrears, their only amusement half-decks of cards and half-finished letters, soldiers who, silently and collectively, provided the greatest moral example by simply refusing to be killed.

The green steeples of Sare had come into view. We trotted though the empty cobbled streets in the moonlight, and I left my charge at the train station, also deserted save for the little green locomotive, which was being washed.

If any of this made any impression on the Professor, he did not say. It was two in the morning when I entered the lime-tree avenue of Semper Vero, the horses trotting on their own accord. Everything on that transparent day had given me pleasure. A thunderstorm was coming up, and as the first rainbursts crackled down, the horses’ withers glittered like a dung beetle’s back. Once in the stable, they swiped at the fragrant hay, then playfully brushed each other’s faces, batting their silken lashes and pawing at the stable floor. Saddle and bridle removed, they exhaled and flung themselves onto a small haystack. Kicking out all four legs and running like dogs in their sleep, they petulantly destroyed the fodder racks, knowing that this night’s grooming would be up to them, groaning in their stalls.

As I entered the hallway I could hear someone playing scales, as was often the case in our house, any time of day or night, but these were exercises of stunning rapidity and monotony. From the top stair I could make out Gubik’s back working robotically on the Bösendorfer, preparing for his audition no doubt. But then I noticed a fat book with scarlet bindings open on the music stand, which he was reading while playing, repeating the scales over and over, as if he were only pretending to practice.

An enormous black-lacquered Panhard-Levassor limousine, whose exaggerated aerodynamics, as with so many French designs (which ape the birdlike only to end up reptilian), was the first automobile ever to arrive at Semper Vero, its bonnet still throbbing even when the engine was turned off. I was astonished to see Öscar Ögur at his footman’s post, only moderately drunk, and for the first time in memory in full uniform: gray-green jacket with horn buttons, gray riding breeches with scarlet revers, and knee-high polished boots. The car was quickly surrounded by a few shaggy fieldhands and slender, wistful goosegirls. Mother, attuned only to the echoes of quadrupeds, had for once not anticipated this arrival; indeed, she was still abed as I ran to rouse Father from his lair. Only when he emerged, gruff and disoriented, did Öscar open the car door, and there Felix recognized the still beautiful if melancholy face of Princess Zanäia, dressed in a simple muslin dress with a single string of pearls and rubies. And behind her, the stolid chocolate gaze and arch benevolence of the Professor.

That very night the Voo returned, or rather his dog did, a final inane augury demanding divination. Azure flecked his mottled back, dappled golden light set his scales ablaze, and in his heads, left and right, his jaws were clamped about the whitest of femurs, while in his middle muzzle, his lips were pursed ovulate, as if around a vowel. He stood there a long time, straining as if to defecate, offering me the bribe of sleep. But omens no longer impressed me, for what good is foretelling if you cannot prevent the disasters you foresee?

“It must be a quarter of a century since I’ve visited your. . parc ,” the Princess announced wistfully. “A wonderful place to discover that childhood is not all asexual, non? Hélas !” She turned slightly to the Professor, holding a hand to her breast. “I cannot keep my eyes fixed on any single face or feeling. The immobility of the eyes is forbidden to those who survive.” And then she moved serenely, save for her darting glances at each footfall, up the staircase to greet Ainoha, who had just emerged in a hooded capuchin robe to mask her disheveled hair and sleep-filled eyes.

In the car Felix could make out a dog with its face squashed horribly against the windscreen. The rear compartment of the Panhard, with its needlepointed empire jump seats, held a number of crystal decanters, several small portraits, an herbarium full of fern specimens, and great wads of manuscript.

“And we’ve brought you some sardines,” the Professor winked, as if this were a gift to the fishiest tapestry on earth.

Father’s first reflex was to move toward the injured animal trapped in the limousine, but sensing his concern, the dog bounced at once through the rolled-down window, exhibiting that it was not maimed at all, but merely an extremely brachiocephalic specimen of a golden chow, its undershot jaw smashed back in its skull like old green potatoes.

“ Now what petit toxemia have you brought me?” Father chuckled beneath his breath.

“You see before you Sophroniska Vom Pouilly-Gepackt,” the Professor said proudly. “The Prinzessin calls her ‘Topsy.’” Topsy staggered with self-importance out to the oval lawn, and before she knew it Father had slipped the Dresden links upon her.

“An interesting specimen,” he murmured. “Full of nothingness, yet oblivious to it.” Then his eyes flared on the animal as if to calm her, as one sets a fire line to contain a larger one. “Put on this bow, my little bitch,” he said to her. And then, linked by the telephone cord, they walked about the grassy circle, entering for a moment the netherworld of direct apprehension.

“The fair sex, as with asteroids, are either coming toward you or going away from you. That is the first thing we must determine,” Felix intoned, “though with royalty ,” he grinned, “we can measure where they have been, if not where they are going.”

“She appears supernormalian to me,” the Professor beamed, though Topsy had begun to stray impertinently as the Dresden circlets imperceptibly swallowed one another, an aimless sluttish gambol, the chief aim of which was apparently to advertise that her every sense was as good as dead, a fact to which Father at first gave a little slack of compassion. Topsy had brought all the self-indulgence of the future Age of Solipsism into Semper Vero with her scraggly arse.

“We have a saying in Cannonia, Professor. ‘From a dog, you will never get bacon.’” Then Felix walked on, relaxed and erect, whistling a little Turkish march, mimicking Topsy’s minimal alertness like a flaneur in a strange city for the first time who pretends he is lost to see what random reaction that might precipitate. This calculated air of absence caught her attention. He cut a scallop from the circle on the next pass, just a fraction, taking the rind off their route and making it ovoid, the telephone cord gradually straightening, until it was taut as the horizon. And then, with the greatest delicacy, he gave neither a pop , a snap , a tug, nor a yank, but something at once more forceful and precise — a pulse before the beat — which drew the collar ringlets taut just above the larynx. This caused Topsy to catch her teenage breath, and thus inverting her sense of smell, focused her brain upon her sphincter, and, like sensing a burnt cake taken out of the oven in the next town, take in the faintest whiff of the invariance of life.