In Partial Disgrace (18 page)
“I have appointments!” he almost shrieked, as Mother held his arm tightly and whispered in his ear.
“You must be careful not to insult my husband’s hospitality,” she intoned, batting her ever-thickening eyelashes. “In
my
father’s day, we would grease the carriage with wolf ’s fat so it was impossible to force the guest’s horse into the shafts. It is the custom in Cannonia for the hosts to keep their guests as prisoners. Sometimes for weeks. Some stay for years!”
The Professor looked helplessly at Father, who was standing tall.
“Now, it is you, my friend, who must learn to stay.” And he raised his hand high, the flat of the palm out. “Stay!” he commanded. Mother felt the Professor’s arm slip from her grasp as he fainted dead away.
The Professor was awakened at daybreak by a rosy-cheeked servant girl with a stiff, brandied café au lait. Through the gauze curtains he could make out an Astingi boy scrambling up and down the poplars. Then he fell into a profound and dreamless sleep, to be awakened at nine for a huge breakfast, during which not a word was said. Afterward they all took a walk, smoked, and talked unconvincingly about the crops and cattle.
“It’s so hard to know what’s on a cow’s mind,” Felix said absently. Upon their return, the jitney had been reassembled, and the piebald mare shone a deep burnt amber from a vigorous grooming. Wolf was happily narcotized in a new wicker kennel.
“Take him home with you,” Ainoha said, ill-concealing her exasperation. “A
taedium vitae
must run its course.”
“He has manners enough now to survive the city,” Felix added.
Everything about their farewell embraces had a jaded, slow-motion quality. I do not know to this day why their simplicity affected me so.
We sat down with iced tea on the terrace as the jitney exited the drive into a driving rain. The
Desdemona
emitted a morose E flat. Ainoha asked Felix why he was so uncharacteristically patient with such stupid questions, and how it was possible for a professional man to have such brutish table manners.
“No one has the courage to ask stupid questions anymore, my dear,” he cut her off, “and as for the eating, that is what comes from taking all your meals
en famille
.”
Mother’s instinct was nevertheless on the mark, for while the Professor had gone out of his way to charm her, exuding both a formal respect and a laconic wit, she had watched him closely, scrutinizing him more minutely than she would a flower. She knew that as quickly as my father made friends, it would fall to her to keep them. She also knew then that something in the Professor’s high-mindedness—always ready to wave the black banner of scrupulosity—would inevitably cause a rupture, for it is the smallest of differences between people that always loom largest in the end.
“It seems to me that in all this talk of method,” she said, “everything depends on whether the therapy is administered before or after the lack of confidence occurs.”
Father ignored her, as he always did when she was right, a curious mark of respect, just as now in his contrarian manner he chose to defend his client after demolishing his most sacred hypotheses, and as a boxer might bow to his rival, who after being hit with everything he had, stayed on his feet, registering pain everywhere except in his eyes.
“He is the most modern of men,” Father concluded cheerfully. “His powers of observation are considerable, if clouded by misunderstandings of a literary nature, a man whose scientific bent is always in conflict with unspoken politics. But no one was ever driven mad by contradictions in
thought
. He is, in short, one of us, only more so. We are going to have something of a
conversazione galante,
he and I.”
“But what, pray, exactly does he do?” Mother said. “Professor from where? Doctor of what?”
“Ah, my dear.” Father made a teepee of his napkin, and daubed his dagger beard. “The Professor has dedicated himself to reconciling those who have proven themselves unlovable.”
(Iulus)
When he had Wolf safely home, the Professor allowed the dog to accompany him everywhere, walking him at noon along the winding
rue de Carcasses
, and even feeding him in the anteroom beneath the portraits of allegorical women and splendid unread books.
The dog had amazingly little appetite, nor did he acknowledge food as the gift it was meant to be. His tail hung like a fox’s, as if appended by a nail. And when they encountered a stranger in the apartment stairwell, the dog did not acknowledge him but only made certain he was a step above or below the figure, remaining supremely indifferent to the nervous petting he evoked. The Dresden collar circleted loose about his neck, occasionally entrapping a broken ear.
The walks were particularly trying. While never a brisk perambulator, the Professor preferred a reasonable pace in order to reoxygenate his brain while perusing antiquarian shop windows. He had been having periodic problems with his feet, or more specifically his shoelaces, which would fray and burst without warning—and for some reason a loose shoe is one of the most disorienting things that can happen to a purposeful man. He had sent the servant girl out, but the laces she brought back were never a proper fit. And when he bent over to relace his boot, his heart pounded in his skull and his breath grew short—“abhypia” was his self-diagnosis. Relacing seemed to take an eternity, all that crossing and recrossing, creating slack and then drawing it tight, and during the process he often felt he should have done more sport as a child. If the laces were too short and he used only half the eyelets, painful pressure was exerted on his arch, yet his toes were left swimming in a fearful void. If too long, he cut them with a penknife, but this created a large, floppy unraveling bow on which he often tripped. He suspected Wolf of gnawing on the laces, but whenever he threw a shoe to tempt the culprit, the dog would look at him as if he had lost his mind.
Throwing away a perfectly good shoe?
So it was with the walking. Wolf would follow behind him in mocking obedience, gradually pulling them into a kind of fuzzy art photograph of a stroll. But whenever they actually stopped—for the dog to urinate, or more often for the Professor to retie his shoe—just as he leaned down Wolf would start moving forward, albeit imperceptibly, and the dignified doctor would find himself hopping in the street, lurching and turning in a
valse galatz
, the leash wrapped around his leg and his ever-loosening shoe flopping on the pavement like an extinct appendage. Once the Professor had regained his footing and untangled them, Wolf would drop behind his heel in what appeared to be perfect compliance (strangers often complimented the animal’s street manners), but in fact the dog was drawing him back to a point of nullity, somehow behind time itself, abandoning their painfully won coordination.
The Professor knew the shortcut of soothing reassurance had failed, yet he lacked the conviction in his own reflexes to pop the chain and impose a mild penance. Indeed, his fear that he might do more harm the animal seemed able to calibrate precisely. (The gentle, sabotaging selfishness of the defenseless.) For all his submissive indifference, Wolf seemed to place an extraordinary, even profound, faith in his master’s increment of fear.
On occasion, usually late in the day, Wolf ’s sore nose would flare up, and the Professor would gaze down his nostrils with a small light. But he could find neither discharge nor irritation, only a long, glaucous tube ending in an opaque sheen of brain mass, unwrinkled like the advanced mammal he was posing as. The Professor noticed that it was only during this particular type of examination that Wolf ’s tail moved, if only the bushy tip, like a feather duster wafted by a particularly senile servant.
“Oh, Wolf, what did they do to you?” the Professor thought, a cry in his heart, and then he rephrased it out loud. “Or rather, what did they make you do? Was it those stupid aristocrats, or the crazed Bolsheviks?”
They settled into this routine over a period of weeks, the Professor now certain that he was saddled sadistically, perhaps forever, with the animal’s misgivings and disconnectedness. Meanwhile, the dog remained perpetually in wait, anticipating the next follow-up examination of his nose or paw, punctuated with bouts of what certainly appeared to be shame, for what else would cause the otherwise gray-white scar tissue to so promiscuously redden?
As a result, a fatal misunderstanding developed. While the Professor was adapting himself to Wolf ’s reserved nature, the dog wanted nothing more than to be inspected, preferably at the exact site of the wound, and as the Professor’s diagnostic attention dwindled, the symptoms of shame worsened. After the vilest supplications, accompanied by compulsive yawning, sighing, coughing, obsessive leg crossing, nose-boring, nail-biting, and flatulence, Wolf ’s manner became sharp. He hammered his scarred nose into the Professor’s groin, apparently threatening to spit up. He shoved his snout under his master’s writing hand, flipping the pen halfway across the room. And he dragged his crippled paw across the doctor’s thigh, leaving welts even through the heavy tweed. Wolf felt that his large, dark friend was abandoning him, and for his part, the Professor could not decide which horrified him most: his patient’s smothering affection or his invasive enmity.
Then, during a stroll, when his attention was focused on a particularly exotic sculpture in a shop window, he felt an uncharacteristically purposeful tug on the leash, and turning, found to his horror a blind beggar selling matchbooks on the sidewalk, with Wolf urinating on the stumps of the poor fellow’s amputated legs. Then and only then, at the height of his fury, did he pop the chain. He heard the click, a ghostly note. Wolf concluded his business, taking his good time, then, after turning slowly and halfheartedly, bit the Professor through his shoe, though without breaking the skin.
He spent long periods gazing into the animal’s eyes, now black as his own, which as the day expired seemed to give off a transient luminescence, a stored electricity generated from within. Yet by evening, when he turned on the paraffin desk lamp, the corneas went completely opaque, as if they were only reflecting external light. As the Professor’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness, Wolf ’s eyes emitted an eerie shine, and when he placed a shaving mirror next to the dog’s skull, he saw that his own had taken on the same cast, though not of the same deep quality. When he turned off the lamp and they sat in pitch-blackness, he faced the problem of reporting from a zone in which they were both blind. The Professor lit a candle nearby, adjusted the temples of his reading glasses to sharpen the magnification, and circled the dog slowly. From a certain angle his spectacles reflected the candlelight into Wolf ’s pupils, which suddenly lit up in a fantastic concatenation, brighter and more diaphanous than any star, and for a moment he thought he could make out a trace of the optic nerve through a web of blood vessels on the inner surface of the eye. Both were bathed for a moment in a spectacular fluorescent orange haze, and little mice of ejaculatory feeling ran along the base of the Professor’s spine, as the animal seemed to be seeing through him.
In the evening they would often sit on the divan together in a kind of mutual matrimonial inertia, the Professor smoking one cigar after another, Wolf pawing at his free hand while snapping at the smoke rings, deprived of the symptoms of hauling which had once brought them into such gripping interaction. Wolf must have finally felt that he had been written off, like an old unbalanced wife. And some evenings the Professor felt vaguely insulted that this refugee had assimilated so rapidly to his new surroundings, appearing to forget both his lost status as top dog as well as that of prisoner, though it was clear by his newly aggressive behavior that he was also telling the Professor that this new life of bourgeois ease and reflection had little intrinsic charm or value, and could never compare to the unique high culture from which he had been forced to flee.
But throughout these mood swings Wolf maintained for most of the day his old apathy, unassailably entrenched in his indifference to territory. He seemed happiest among strangers in the stairwell, where hierarchy was clearly marked by the steps. Finally, the Professor realized that painful as the consequences might be, something in him preferred the dog’s play for attention to his diffidence. Wolf ’s quieter and more contemplative moods seemed an affront. His patient’s sufferings had ceased prematurely, and the Professor preferred hypochondria to an impoverished ego. If nothing could be done for his nose, then something for his state of mind! The dog had come to him a megalomaniac, and now was entirely incapacitated and dependent upon others, unable even to feed himself or complete a defecation. Wolf had lost interest in his own history, or indeed what might become of him. His was a world which was perfectly adequate without lovers and loved ones, without hope and without fear.
“My dearest Friend,” the Professor wrote Felix:
There is a gap in our letters which is uncanny. Then came your letter today on the fundamentals of the soul, which with its meticulous refutations of my fantasies, typical of a doctor dilettante, I found so refreshing. If I may summarize your lengthy advice in professional language, it would be as follows:
1) Pay attention to the principles of loyalty, not to whatever system they are embedded in.
2) Never use the phrases “before,” “during,” or “after” to explain anything.
3) Hysteria is both a dead language and a new language.
4) Temperament has replaced metaphysics as the basis of philosophy.
Why is it, incidentally, that you never complain of your own health problems, with which I feel, in secret, such biological sympathy? I have noted for some time that you bear your suffering better and with more dignity than I. I have all sorts of doubts about my constitution and often cannot remember what I have found out about it that is new, since everything about it seems to be new. It is as if I am thrown out of the train at every station along the line, and every town is named “If I Can Stand It.” Well enough of that.
My question today is, Why do I admire your utter stoicism, even wish it for myself, yet am suspicious of it in Wolf? He no longer attempts to capture my favor by anything but the crudest attempts. I believe he is withdrawing from me as his unpleasure disappears from some imagined slight. He still has that conspicuous tic around the eyes, and occasionally he forces his lips into a snout—for sucking? Biting? All day long I try to be kind and witty, original and superior, congenial and conciliating, yet he maintains only a pitiable reserve as a reproach to my efforts, as if all of my insights are equally brilliant, and equally besides the point. A slow piece of work, indeed! Do you remember, in true suffering, his pace was wonderful! I even find myself hoping for a relapse, so I might eradicate every vestige of his precious illness. I dream he becomes miserable again so as to facilitate work, for at present he makes me feel that I have turned into a carcinoma to which nothing will adhere. I am entertaining the thought of applying “pitiless pressure” in the hope of breaking the impasse, of sketching out, as it were, an episode of finality.
Hoarse and breathless, I await your advice.
Your admiring and faithful Friend.
The next day, between dusks of snow flurries and noons of the sharpest brightest sun, the Professor and Wolf were sitting on a bench in the Augarten. The dog seemed uncharacteristically energetic, and the Professor unsnapped his leash to let him roam.
The dog was wearing his new signet collar, a gift from Semper Vero made from medallions awarded in competitions Wolf would not even have been allowed to watch, much less participate in. The Roman coins used as solder gave off a ginger glow, the pride of the Chetvorah, taking even its most worthless cousin into company.
Wolf ambled three-legged down the gravel path, every few steps holding up his damaged paw like a talisman. His was a determined yet relaxed pace, without checking back. He had never ventured farther from his master’s side. The Professor watched him approvingly all the way down the path, until he noticed at the end of the
alleé
, through the ornate gate, a huge new flag flapping with thundercracks against the facade of the
Justizpalast
. The government had apparently changed, and he had been so preoccupied with Wolf he hadn’t even noticed it. A military band had struck up. Music without words always made him nervous.
The dog continued down the path, worrying sparrows, who in turn were worrying horse apples, until at last he reached the street, where, persecuted by fate and abandoned by medicine, the beshitted Wolf leapt gracefully into the open rear of a passing van and disappeared.
That evening Father’s belated telegram arrived:
Intervene
STOP
But remember
STOP
The lion springs only once!