In Partial Disgrace (24 page)
As I was about to explain the meaning of this gift, Iulus wrestled a hindquarter down from the nose of a particularly proud elk, cut a large chunk from the gelatinous pink mass, and pinning the meat to the table with a knife nearly as large as a sabre, detached the heart of the loin. Then he took a smaller knife from his boot and began to mince the loin with a flurry of strokes. Soon there was a pile of maroon shavings, and he wrapped these in old yellowed newspapers which announced the Russian victory at Kursk, an international congress on physiology in Leningrad held in spite of the siege, and the lead piece, a dog show in Silbürsmerze, noting that the number of entrants was the lowest since the flu epidemic of 1919.
We put the meat and select items from Chicago in a rucksack, clicked our heels together, put our voices well back in the larynx, shot up our forearms, and with a merciless ironic giggle (which I then believed to be an entirely new form of humor) goose-stepped out of the Meat Museum and reentered the square, which now seemed darker and more claustrophobic than the cellar. Crossing to an elliptical corner, a dark lane at once opened up, and as we left the square it transformed itself back into a trapezoid.
The houses leaned in upon us, insisting, as with everything else in the country, upon their own manner of collapsing. I was losing both my concentration and curiosity, crushed by the thought of the numberless exhibits I had not yet seen. But my guide had an exquisite sense of these matters, and a clap on the shoulder indicated that our general orientation was about to be concluded. We had indeed come upon a rather astonishing detached house in a relatively new suburban quarter. As was common with Cannonian bourgeois townhomes of the inter-war period, the small front yard was adorned with busts of the resident family—Mother, Father, and two daughters in this case. The sculptor had given each of them the same expression of tranquil pride with a trace of sarcasm.
The house was of three stories—gray limestone, green majolica tile, and terracotta successively—topped off with a copper mansard roof in which were set two rows of false arches. All this was surmounted by a domed cupola with an open window, from which at this very moment, chin out, tail elevated, and legs tucked expertly beneath him, a red dog leapt into space. A geyser of water erupted from the courtyard as the animal plunged some sixty feet into a raised pool. As we drew nearer, I was aware only of the circular pool, exploding every few moments with another spume, flashes of red fur hurtling across a plum sky, a curved double staircase leading up to flung-open French doors fluttering with torn lace drapes. The first dog who leapt had by now paddled up to the fluted edge of the pool, his bushy muzzle plastered slick as an otter’s, the nails of his forepaws glistening as he hauled himself from the water. He shook himself into a convulsion which began in his jaws and ended with a crack of his tail as an aureole of mist rainbowed about him. As he sat shaking, I was aware of another shape cannonading into the pool behind him, another dashing across the drive spewing gravel in all directions, another taking the staircase in three powerful bounds, the front and rear paws crossing one another at the peak of the gallop, another disappearing through the French doors, another ascending the interior spiral staircase without breaking stride, and yet another bursting from the cupola without a moment’s hesitation, launched into the darkening air in the noblest of freefall frozen poses, until he too galooped into a geyser of white foam.
I was witnessing the circular blur of a pack, a volley of arrows. Wetted down in elongated suspended flight, each dog preceded and followed his psychopomp in a never-ending chain of pure play. It was as if we were at the World’s Fair booth of some unknown mad little country, where you were not sure if you were watching a film, puppets, wound-up dolls, or perfectly trained animals, or whether this was a ritual entertainment, some veiled protest at an ancient insult, an induced lunacy, or a scientific experiment in which the exact protocol had been forgotten. It was the sort of arresting image one was to encounter often in the conundrum of Cannonia, but when I asked my guide what on earth was going on, he replied wittily but without irony, with one half-closed eye, “Many dogs taking a bath downtown?”
That’s what I came to love about Cannonia; it may be too much but it never gets too long.
On the bootscraper back at Semper Vero, dried pomegranate colored mud fell away from our feet like broken waxen molds. Then, as the color ebbed from the sky, we experienced the “wolf-light.” The rocks flared ochre, apricot, and magnesium blue, as a great solemnity pervaded everything. We dined by candlelight on elk carpaccio, blood sausage, hot banana pepper, and coffee dropped in from America. Then Iulus produced a bottle of 1806 Napoleonic cognac. “The Ton-Tin,” he murmured softly, “the bottle which survivors of the regiment drink to those who have fallen. I suppose we are they.” We toasted the past, present, and future, we toasted our parents, our children to be, our friends, each other. We toasted Great Britain, we toasted Russia, we toasted any country we could think of. We drank in memory of countless invasions, oppressions, diasporas, droughts, earthquakes, and sufferings, and we drank to America, the only country, as Iulus reminded me, whose national anthem begins with a question.
Then I produced the packet of LIBERTY margarine I had carried with me from the Meat Museum, with its bullet of carrot coloring at the center. Iulus stared at the deathwhite glob with undisguised disdain. I broke the nodule and the fluorescent amber dye spread throughout the plastic globe, its ugly streaks very much like the rays of a burst sun which figured so often in the crests of the Central Empires. It became striped as the dawn in Cannonia, though harsher and stranger. I kneaded this little distended synthetic world, pushing here, pulling there, until it gradually reassumed its ovoidal shape, colorized into a new alloy, piss yellow and old gold. I haven’t the faintest idea why I did this.
A frieze around our empty dining room announced all the secret societies of the masculine and feminine temperaments, which did not clash as much as they fitfully and fantastically informed upon one another. Against a molding of the purest white and gold, blue Wedgewood medallions of young ladies in classical white dresses shot bows and arrows, played blind man’s bluff, or cavorted with boars and dolphins. The chairs were lyre-backed Chippendale, the tea service bronze, the oval table black pearwood. And interspersed among these refined objects were mahogany and walnut cabinets stuffed with rifles, maps, documents, busts of emperors, heavy decanters, half-open annotated books, tobacco jars from every country, stoneware, earthenware, and striped agateware. The walls held a great number of recumbent odalisques, all smoking, each more seductive than the last, painted in a rather crude but very up-to-date art nouveau style, though pride of place was given a tall portrait of a great beauty in a soldier’s uniform with an eye patch (his sainted mother, it turned out), whose cyclopean golden gaze presided over all. There was also an enormous sooty rectangle over the piano testifying to a huge but recently removed canvas, no doubt a spoil of war, as well as a portrait of Grandfather Priam, who needed no introduction, given his half-closed eye and distant gaze to the East.
After supper, we cut a long Virginia cigar in half, and smoking it in relays, walked in the secret passage to the subterranean great hall lined with the portraits of former owners of Semper Vero, most of whom had never been near the place in their lives. They were painted in the early Cannonian iconic style, no texture to their furs, medals brighter than their eyes, a two-dimensional condition that I had no problem identifying with in the torchlight. I cannot to this day bear to spend more than fifteen minutes in a museum, but as I walked the great hall with Iulus, those floating transparent half-length images in reddish ochers, gold leaf, and velvety blues, their unselfabsorbed gaze radiating out and down from the axis of their bodies, formed a bond with each other and with me. They were not likenesses but presences. Theirs was not an attitude you could call beautiful, but one which promised somehow to restore fortune and confound enemies. No artist of the Renaissance could approach the ability to understand the virility, madness, and fire-breathing spirit in those tragic golden faces painted upon such programmatic human forms. Most had no frames, though some were equipped with winged doors so they might be closed. It was as if we were surrounded by a curious but friendly mob, full of contradictory emotions, their pride certain at the moment they had been transfixed, but also a supersensuous sadness for the future. In their imperceptibly glazed transitions, the reference for near and far was gone. In their temperas of egg yolk, rye beer, and ground alabaster, it was almost impossible to tell what was physical and what was reflection. Indeed, the panels must have been warped, like the curvature of the earth, or of the eyeball itself; and in the erratic light the brush strokes seemed composed not with temperas but blood and water, the dead matter of paint forgotten. It was as though the owners had all been painted at their last breath, and painted by the same person over five hundred years, so they were at once living and lifeless, imitating life from art. I felt their eyes saw me, and that their hearts understood me, those intercessors bathed in unconditional light.
My life was changed in that moment. I wanted to be counted among the absentee owners of Semper Vero, even if only as temporary custodian. The rays from those golden faces upon my nose seemed more important than any idea I would ever have. I wanted only to see the world through their eyes. “Poor Giotto’s nothing compared to them,” Iulus shrugged as the torch burnt out and my happy indoctrination ended.
I relieved myself in the single guest bath, a long high room with the watercloset set a good nineteen feet above the commode, featuring a quite large painting of a hoopskirted gentlewoman, black curls tumbling from her bonnet, who supported an impeccably dressed but slightly wounded soldier, his head resting on her shoulder, while she gently masturbated him. By comparison, this early Catspaw made the small Roualt over the washbasin seem somewhat academic. Not for nothing was this known as the finest lavatory in Cannonia.
I found Iulus on the terrace, his hands folded behind him, gazing out over the embankment of the Mze. The coots had set up an unceasing shriek in the reed-beds, the primeval agony of a love-factory in late spring. I attempted to return our conversation to matters of the mission, and so inquired after the whereabouts of the
Sicherheitshauptamt
, that madman of a puppet premier who had inflicted so much needless suffering upon his poor nation. “One can hide forever in Cannonia,” Iulus murmured, “he might well be just down the road, asleep in phlox and snapdragons, or perhaps in the subterranean regions, where even the Russians will not find him. Or perhaps the Americans have offered him a professorship?”
For the first time I saw a lethargic cynicism creep into his eyes as he took a seat.
“You must be tired. I know I am,” he said. Then he sighed. “Is it permissible, to lose interest . . . even in evil?” he asked gently. And when I mumbled incoherently, “It must be possible to do something, you just can’t let all this go to the hell . . .” he reached across the wrought-iron table to put a cool hand over mine. “You can see that we are more pious, brave, and clever than the rest,” he said. “But you don’t seriously think we can be saved, do you?”
At midnight, we went for a swim in the Crab Pond and bade farewell to our adolescence. We bedded down on the sofas with the dogs wound tight about us, and broke the ancient rule of war, both going to sleep at once without a sentry.
Before first light I was awakened by hoofbeats. I peered out between the dusty damask curtains and could make out an Astingi patrol in jerkins of lilac, mulberry, and sulfur, bows and machine guns slung across their shoulders, winding single file down the fenlands from the source of the Mze. Their complicated demeanor was very like the frescoes of the former owners, at once both tranquil and agitated. Like their country, their aroma preceded them, a combination of dead lilies, saddle leather, jasmine, and mocha. They galloped once around the fresh grave mound in silent lamentation, and then wound their way down the drive, all pale hair and plumed shakos, lances and lopsided triple crosses. Their gray and white carts were tilted in their shafts from their burdens. Young girls in loose trousers, suckling buttoneyed infants, walked beside the black kneeboots of their mounted husbands, abetted by red rough-coated dogs and black unbelled oxen. Behind the last cart, on a silver chain, an eagle walked desultorily as a chicken. They moved in sluicelike silence, taking a shortcut around the town, and raising only a wisp of dust into the sunrise.
Dawn came early and pallid as a lemon-rind as the sun rose out of Russia. It was time to get down to business. I reminded Iulus of the crown. He threw up his arms as if in a mock surrender, and led me, chuckling, across the
cour d’honneur
to a small Tudor cottage connected by a broken arbor to an unkempt cutting garden. He turned on the gas lamp, and we picked our way across a floor littered with smashed flowerpots and broken-handled rakes and spades. The cottage’s shelves were filled with old letter files, metal cigar boxes, small carriage trunks, matched plaid luggage, Gladstone valises, and a great profusion of loose, half-destroyed papers. “Observations of a literary nature,” he reassured me, “and without intelligence value.” In a corner, amongst a huge nest of shredded correspondence, framed in a whelping box constructed of a dozen inlaid woods, a litter of just-weaned red pups yipped and scurried.
The crown was hung on a peg near a small rear window, its dull golden gleam and rough unfaceted dark gems testifying to an ancient, unrefined smelting process. It was topped with a bent lopsided triple cross, an exciting pagan touch. He handed it to me casually, pointing out the fragment of the Pope’s gemstone, Gemma Augustea, and the Byzantine silvery filigrance of the first czar, Monomach. And then he related the Astingi curse attached to that bizarre object, which translates imperfectly as, “Wear the crown and lose your culture.”