Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The Professor accepted this with equanimity — indeed, he seemed to take pleasure in what Father told him. He simply said, “I need something, someone strong in my life.”

Father pretended not to hear. He had already removed the drying manuscript pinned to the periodical rack where the issues of Dogdom for each year had been bound annually in blue cloth with leather spines. He matched the Prinzessin’s papers with the subsection on “Chow Life,” and found the lineage quickly, whereupon he broke into a devilish grin.

“It seems, Professor, that what we have here is a hegemonic Anglo-American cross.”

The Professor’s face fell.

“And there seems another burden you must bear, my friend: the pater, Tartoum the Fifth. The chow breed became popular in England when Queen Victoria put one in her kennels. Tartoum won the show at the Crystal Exhibition despite biting the judge and his handler. He was owned by one Marchioness Hurtley, who, after centuries of random breeding, decided to fix, in a fit of Darwinism ”—Felix spat this word—“the traits she most prized. In this case the project was to deangulate the hindquarters and perfect the perpetual scowl. She was trying for aristocratic aloofness, one must suspect; what she got was bitterness. She strengthened the back legs, no doubt, which is why we now have a leonine body upon pencil legs, like an old whore. In any event, Tartoum continued to win and bite — the more he won, the more he bit — and the English dealt with this in their usual manner, by changing ownership often, so that Tartoum accumulated as many masters as medals, bringing glory to a succession of not-so-old families — always in need of certification — who, having filled their trophy case with his ribbons, passed on his viciousness at a profit to one another. Tartoum did manage, randomly, to produce some notable dogs, mainly daughters: Blue Cobweb and Tam Wong Ton come to mind. I saw the latter drag a child on a sled once at Berlin.”

This too did not perturb the Professor. His eyes were black as coal and his jaw was set in a particularly determined line.

“Given this line of development, Councilor,” he said calmly, “what would you suggest in the way of reinforcement?”

“It’s perhaps too late,” Father said, “but chows do not like to let go of things, and for some reason do not like to be touched around their hindquarters. The Tartars’ whip, perhaps? Without delay you should let them play with your hand in their mouth and touch them all about their privates. When you can insert a finger under their tongue without being hurt, and a finger in their anus without hurting them — well, that’s about as far as you can go with a chow.”

The Professor nodded reflectively.

“Of course, we only have half the story.”

“Pardon?”

“The American mother, sir, is Arrogant Melody Moonbeam! The credentials, if we can believe them, are impressive: a certificate at Westminster,” he read further, “yes, yes, this should interest you. It seems that the great preponderance of American chow exhibitors are doctors. Arrogant Melody is owned, but not handled, by a Dr. Herb Fagen of Staten Island, a proctologist, it seems.”

The Professor’s hand felt inside his vest for a Trabuko.

“And her parents are from the great state of California. Would you care to know their names? Here, write this down: “Sid and Maurey Mintz are the breeders in Sacramento, California. Sid is an oral surgeon, Maurey a ‘homemaker’”—what do you suppose that is? And the grandparents are here: Bring the Bacon, a four-time champion of Orange County, and Rabbinic Petticoat Lane. Curious names, no? These chow-minded folk.”

The cigar was lit but there was no smoke; it was all inside the Doctor. Father gravely turned the pages.

“And two littermates of Moonbeam have eight points toward their championships: Don Li Chowtime and Cotton Candy Chink. So it would seem that we have invigorated the inbred royal line with the hardy middle-class blood of the restless people of Aaron.”

“Bourgeois,” the Professor snorted. And through the murmurous whispers of manuscript Father cocked one ear like a dozing dog who hears a distant gunshot. Perhaps he was trying to wiggle his ears, but there were no puptricks left in his repertoire. He fixed the Professor with an arctic gaze. He was cool, so cool it burnt.

“You of all people should know,” he spoke with icy lucidity, each phrase like a scythe blade, and widening his eyes as if to take in all the room, “that we will always have need of a place outside the bourgeois and beyond capital.”

The Professor made a small sheepish gesture. “You have an extraordinary ability to discompose a person,” but Felix again did not hear. He repeated his last words to himself as if dazed, then wandered over to another glass vitrine of artifacts and began to strip it of manuscript.

Now, one kind word (or less harsh joke) from either one would have ended this confrontation, and concluded our tale on a still tenuous but more appealing note. But the time had come for their favorite game, the game which spared no feelings, a game which could only be played spontaneously by two powerful men, each believing the one was incapable of hurting the other, a battle of the polymaths.

It was in an exorbitant, hyperbolic mood that Father opened the vitrine and set out the two artifacts of the day: first, a female figure cut from lava, schematic and wide-buttocked, a goddess with elongated neck and stumps for arms, wearing a belt with discs on the pubis and each hip, the shoulders incised with meanders, chevrons, and semi-circles; and next, a veined, rosy, marble male member, half-hooded, with a single incision in its tip, and broken from its torso.

“Of the goddess we know nothing,” Father said, “except that pieces like it are invariably found whole, the lack of a head and arms due to the indifference or crudity of the maker. Of the other, we know even less, except that both statues stood on the Via Ocampo in Rome, the goddess within the temple, the naked general without. Here, speak into the radio.” He picked up the pink penis of Marcus Aurelius from the table as if it were a tarot discard. “Put it in your mouth,” Father said slowly. The Professor gazed across at him quizzically.

“Pretend you’re a horse and think of it as just another sort of snaffle,” Father continued in a rather uncharacteristic singsong. “Put it in your mouth and I’ll tell you a story, better than that little bastard, Gubik. It’s called ‘The Bourgeois and the Barbarians.’”

The Professor held the piece of marble between his fingers like a cigar.

“You must be joking.”

“Never more serious in my life. You’d be far better off with that in your mouth than those damn Trabukos. Saxa loquuntur ! (Stones speak!)”

The Professor knew he was being double-dared, and so, with rather too much exaggeration, replaced his cigar with the stone.

“How is it?” Father asked.

“Is kalt .”

And with that, Father began to murmur about that admirable man, the last of the good emperors, who on the very spot where they had now taken their stand, had been the first to scan the Astingi across the Mze.

“So, Marcus,” Father invoked his name, as if he were seated at the table, “that befuddled and permanently transitional figure, sent to an unattractive region to stem the tides of barbarism, only to end up theoretical and melancholy. The first real westerner, Marcus, weary of life, unable to praise an uneasy peace, denied a climactic victory, waiting for the retreat to sound, avoiding malice but never really sealing the borders, yet never quite overrun, and forgiving the avarice and treachery of those around him only because there was no adequate form of revenge. The first intellectual, Marcus, a man of good intentions who was nevertheless basically a humbug and a prig, a kind of schoolmaster silently condemning everyone, obsessed with self-perfection and the reiteration of moral platitudes, full of precepts and self-exhortations, addressing no one but himself, even though he is king, general, and scribe. In an Age of Hypochondria, he finds his audience distracted. He has a bad marriage and knows the most deplorable of his children will succeed him. He meditates, if that’s the word, not upon the empire, but upon death. The Mze is frozen solid, and one moonless night there is a cavalry battle on the frozen ice floes, the horses slipping and sliding amidst showers of sparks, the torches held by the horse handlers. Two mounted regiments clashing head on in a medium where every strategy and virtue is turned into a nightmare of pure chance. And after this, ignoring the most amusing thing that might befall a commander in all his campaigns, Marcus does not even count the bodies in the morning, but returns to his tent to be alone with his ‘diary,’ his nocturnal, where, after many a midnight lucubration, he submits his body to his mind, the only struggle being between the thinker and his thought — real pensées such as ‘Virtue is the only good,’ ‘Time is a torrent,’ and ‘Put down the bitter cucumber.’ And there in his tent, Marcus makes the astounding discovery that serenity is possible only when all things are external to you. While from across the Mze comes the taunt, as it comes still: ‘Fight Marcus! Get naked and fight!’”