In Partial Disgrace (11 page)

In any event, our advance column breached the Hron and, leaving Dede-Agach and her wasp-waisted women, slowly negotiated the trackless wastes of the Marchlands on a southeasternly salient, without a single act of resistance, indeed without a single incident of any kind. Through our binoculars we scanned the villages where no flag flew, a village darkness like no other darkness. (“A land so poor that even the crows fly upside down to avoid seeing it,” was how an eighteenth-century traveler had described it.) In not-so-short order, outrunning our gasoline supplies, our armored column finally spread out over some seventy miles. Directed by scurrying jeeps and swooping Piper Cubs, we finally reached a perfectly unknown double-oxbow of the Mze.

Breached for the first time since Napoleon, the Mze had proven a disappointment in every way. Planes had photographed it, engineers had studied it for months, generals had dreamed of nothing else. But when we got there it wasn’t as big as the Mississippi, or as beautiful as the Hudson, or as rough as the Colorado—just graygreen, cold, and unimpressive. “Never halt on the near side of a river, even if you do not intend to exploit the crossing.” Had that ancient injunction not been pounded into us in War College, we would have never have forged the Mze. As it was, the engineer in charge of the pontoon bridge was in despair when he was told it had taken him twelve hours longer than it had taken Julius Caesar. But soon our first column of tanks crossed the bridge, draped now with drying wash, captured flags, and laughing naked spitting boys. And an hour later, on the firmer ground of a glacier scour, our half-tracks crested the bluffs of yet another bend of the Mze. Downriver, a dozen locomotives were parked on a siding, alongside barges packed with knocked-down submarines. The trains had been blasted to smithereens, one locomotive pointing straight up, like a dog begging on its hind legs. The current was so stolid that it gave no reflection whatsoever. There was not even the trace of an eddy, a fleck of foam. It made not the slightest sound. “Let’s go down and piss in it,” my sergeant driver said, and so we did.

Once relieved, I chanced to glance up, and on the far bank I could make out a band of silent mounted men, an Astingi advance guard which I recognized by their raspberry overcoats and high fur hats, something you don’t often see in April. They were gazing down at us paternalistically, as they had for three thousand years, witnessing the besmirched Matron of Christendom as she once again walked into their shallow stream to perish. After buttoning up their overcoats and letting off a single rifle shot, they held up an odd three-fingered salute and filed silently away behind a dome of rocks.

So it was that we came to parade rest on Cannonia’s watery border, about to read her secretmost entrails, prepared to open a spacious wound in Hell’s own soil, dig out ribs of gold, and build a Pandemonium. We had no experience with that long tradition in which the cheerful and well-intentioned tyrant, with his perverse magnanimity and wooden hug, enters the ghostly empire to pick up the beautiful corpse, only to have it fall apart in his hands. Indeed, we believed, even more than the communists, that we had captured a stage of history—the worst thing, according to Astingi lore, that can befall a people.

That night, all along the Mze, our artillery massed hub to hub, we lay down a coordinated fire the likes of which even the most battle-hardened veteran had never seen. The Conqueror was smiling in his chariot, and his horses smiled the same hard smile. You could read the dark book of history as if it were daylight; the barrage threw all the objective ground to be taken into bold and summary relief. We had been ordered to explode all four corners of Cannonia. But she never really caught, only smoldered. A stench of blasted muck hung over the country for years after the war as the louring Commander reined in his foaming steeds.

We had hardly bivouacked when an old soldier came stumbling out of the forest in a uniform cobbled together from five or six nations, and began to spill the beans in several different languages before we even put him on the ground. His first words were a warning not to shell the barges down river, as they were loaded with poison gas. Then he added proudly that this was the exact spot he had surrendered in the First World War. “I can’t read or write,” he muttered, “but I can sing.” My rule then as now was to never interrogate a prisoner under forty, for you can learn little from a man who still thinks he has something to prove.

I can’t say that we completely understood him, our proficiency in languages being of a strictly schoolboy nature, and it became increasingly clear that Öscar Özgur was something of an idiot, though quite calm and professional about it.

But Öscar had in his possession a letter written on violet stationery in rather grandiloquent French, addressed to no one in particular, sealed with the waxen emblem of a
petite noblesse terrienne
, as well as the last attestatory secret code of our man behind the lines. There was also a latitude and longitude for a proposed rendezvous, and the promise of a bonfire burning. The family crest portrayed a nymph trying on a crown (the infamous Venus of Muranyi, I was to learn) astride an inscription: “Back to the original sources.” It concluded rather formally, with my contact’s swirling vermillion signature dusted with cinnabar.

Naturally, the letter stunned me. Even the most dedicated student of Cannonian affairs could not have anticipated such a windfall. I admit I had the stench of priceless treasures and czar’s gold in my nostrils. My putative superiors were still well to the rear, and there was little point in torturing such a pathetic messenger with further cross-examination. Things were loose at the front in those days, my OSS papers invited no questioning from even the most belligerent rednecked MP, and the letter seemed to fulfill the spirit of my vague orders. I may have lacked Zeus’s stamina and colorful disguises, but I had his roving eye. I wanted to do things with Cannonia, some gently, some not so, some with long graceful movements, some with short automatic bursts. And then of course, I wanted to pick up her broken body and be cheered in the streets. These were not the naïve sentiments of a wild-eyed boy. That was always to be the fatal misapprehension of our adversaries. For we were born harsh, beyond the Gulf Stream. We only looked soft and shiny—like a larva, concealing a stinger enfolded in its heavy blond wings—a vast armada of Detroit steel and Texas oil, beneath a comic sheen. I was looking for no vista, I can tell you, no place to meditate, no real estate. When you grow up looking at nothing but billboards and telephone poles, and your only relation to the past is Euclidian geometry, you don’t mind looking, properly armed, straight into the jaws of hell. And in Cannonia, where the sky meets the ground like no place else on earth, at dusk everything is the color of a runaway dog.

To tell you the truth, I never felt either courageous or foolhardy. I had spent most of the war pretending I wasn’t baffled. I never heard from anyone a patriotic sentiment. We were simply fatalistic. And we felt so much more akin to the Germans and the Russians that we could hardly believe we were fighting with the English and the French. I mean let’s be honest about it. Was anything ever more fun than picking up the Europids—those peoples who have made an artform of feeling sorry for themselves—in their unparalled wickedness, and bringing them sternly to account? You can get away with murder in America, but only in Europe can you be
really
bad. My specialty and my nearsightedness had so far protected me from the more suicidal missions in which our men behind the lines had been my proxy. I had a burning desire to do good. And to kill somebody.

Orders in my pocket and invitation in hand, I was nevertheless overcome by an anxiety I had never felt in battle, a
horror vaccui
, in which even a tear for our sacrifices would not flow. I have never felt such unease or uncomprehending fear as I did that late afternoon on the Mze. Old hands call it
Fingerspitzengefuhl
(fingertiptingling), and it is more addictive than sex. But what good is foretelling if you cannot forestall the disasters you foresee?

I commandeered a jeep, and on a makeshift runway in a sugarbeet field, after presenting my doctored Joint-Chief-of-Staff ’s
laissez passer
, talked a bored flyboy into taking me up. I don’t know what kind of plane it was, only that the takeoff seemed longer than the flight.

The manor house of Semper Vero squatted phlegmatically upon the flattened top of an eroded volcanic cone. From the base of the old volcano, blackened vineyards and chocolate-colored fields fell away on all sides, interspersed with patches of mustard flared with poppies. Each irregular field was partitioned with musk rose and yellow gorse, and every inch was cultivated to the very edge of a serpentine road which ended abruptly at the base of steep forested slopes. As Iulus poled me across the Mze, in a strange copper-prowed caique, I again consulted my maps, and realized that this rim of heavy dark primeval forest was the same wall of oak and beech that Marcus Aurelius had rightly feared as the home of the barbarian, and yet it was here, in the only forward outpost in which he felt truly safe, that he laid down his pen and died. The river at this crossing point seemed to be encased with sheets of steel.

The walled park surrounding the house was filled entirely with evergreens: blueblack spruce, lime-green tsuga, the feathery apricot of Zelkova, and an occasional bright minaret of golden cypress, amidst a deep sprawl of weeping hemlock and thick red trunks of fragrant cedars. The ancient Cannonian saying has it that “trees and men are friends,” and Semper Vero was the arboreal testament that the non-indigenous could flourish and thrive in Cannonian soil, as long as they were planted close enough together to endure the brutal cross-winds which had dragged me so many miles. It was also clear that in Cannonia even the seasons were compressed and overlapped, and everywhere spontaneous mutation was emphasized over evolution. After all, I too was something of a farm boy, growing up in Ohio nursery country on the lip of the great glacier, and for each huge specimen that Iulus proudly pointed out I had seen in its two-year form in five-gallon cans along the highway or on a truck, and I knew its four-color seasonal blooms from a catalog. I may have been inexperienced, but I was hardly naïve about the trials of beautification projects.

We approached the manor by a narrow winding peat road, through the filigree of a beech grove in bud, passing a massive empty fountain, a sulfurous diagonal stripe across its marble rim the only trace of its former water jet. It was obvious I was not the first combatant to visit Semper Vero. The retreating Germans had time only to gouge some second-rate
plein d’air
paintings from their frames, the amber inlays from the library, the nametags from the arboretum (only the ones in Latin), and after boobytrapping the winecellar, left singing at the top of their lungs. Shortly thereafter, a motorized Siberian advance column had arrived in padded winter uniforms and pressed their perspiring Mongol faces against the long French windows. They crated up the tractor and generator, drank the cologne and brakefluid, and after eating a puppy, blew several of themselves up with the wine. Yet as far as I was concerned, this all could have happened a thousand years ago.

The house appeared to be constructed of every historical style imaginable, a marvelous mad medley of academic and ad hoc concepts, its Byzantine aspects reproachful of its gothic elements, its Victorian additions so expressive in their hatred for everything baroque. And yet despite these open contradictions and hostilities, the house, like my host, exuded in the midst of its pathetic, humiliated, and mutilated little country an enormous self-assurance and intimidating ease; and the great appeal of an abandoned house is, after all, the thrill that the owner is going to catch you in it. I will not pretend to be able to render a specific impression of that eccentric house, except to say that its main beauty lay in the abandoned and overgrown park that surrounded it, madder rose and mariposa lilies mingling beneath the open branches of fig trees and dark allées of cypress, down which an unmarked divebomber, its ordnance spent, occasionally roared incuriously.

From a squat central turret, a tattered gray flag embroidered with a mauve rose still flew.

Iulus did not often look you in the eyes, but when he did you had the unnerving feeling he was looking right to the back of your skull. Dressed in tennis flannels of another era, he conducted our tour of the park with a slightly bored air, as if he had been preparing for this moment all his life and could have gone through it in his sleep. We wandered down the overgrown enfilades bordered with parasol pines and groves of catalpas planted upon mounds, glomerations of plane trees, clusters of cutleaved ash, spruce with huge wartlike thickenings, clumps of unpruned Schwedler maples, and two-hundred-year-old specimens of silk pine and ginkgo. He encouraged me to explore the sightlines to every point of the compass, noting that one could see an enemy approaching from any direction. Eventually we made our way through a ravine in which four or five hundred oaks and chestnuts had been uprooted by stray artillery.

“If I were an American,” Iulus spoke at length for the first time, as if to wish away the blasted landscape, “I would tell you that this park holds the greatest collection of evergreens east of the Rhine, and is one of two places in the world (the other is in China) where northern and southern forests commingle in a thin belt at the nether lip of the Ice Age.”

He had an amazingly deep and magnificent voice, something like a cello, one of those voices which seem to come out of the entire skull rather than the facial cavity, and he had mastered the trick of lowering it a register still further when interrupted, surprising me into a listening silence. “You are standing in the most botanically diverse place on earth,” he concluded, “where the coniferous and deciduous, the foliate and naked, the arctic spruce, the fig, and magnolia can exist perfectly composed, side by side.” Then he stepped back and gestured toward the southern vista.