In Partial Disgrace (27 page)

The parentheses of my father’s hands closed, as if to wring the last, long, soft note out. The view became bright and empty, the fields desolate.

“They’re demons now,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Their sordid history has overtaken them.”

“Call them!” the Professor cried out, wringing his hands. It was like the cry of a woman who has been told her husband is dead. “Call them back!”

Father called out their names in a high, clear voice, more to comfort his friend than anything. Then he blew on the horn of bone and finally the steel whistle, an ear-splitting military pitch of the last resort, though he knew better. On the overgrazed hill beyond the forest, we could make out the stag lumbering up the slope, pausing every now and then to aim a labored hindquarter kick. And behind him, losing ground like their names, the two spittle-sucking stumblebums in blind pursuit. They disappeared into the hooded Cannonian landscape of uncomprehending beasts and unskillful hunters.

“They’re too far to hear,” the Professor said agonizingly.

“Oh, they hear all right,” my father said, “but it’s just one voice among others now.”

The Professor turned tearfully. “Nothing to be done?”

“Absolutely nothing. It’s not that they have forgotten exactly. They are simply beyond their own faculties. Now we can only pray the stag does not run them into wire, or that some besotted shepherd does not shoot them. And when they come back down the road in a few days, full of burrs, their tongues hanging out like blood sausage, you will notice that your love and concern has been turned to an urge to punish. No, they will not look you in the eye. They will not even come to the house. They will go and beg to be let into the kennel. Remember the scene, Herr Doktor, not the individuals.”

“If we had accompanied them,” the Professor broke out accusatorially, “this would not have happened.”

“Precisely,” my father said calmly and politely. “They reached the end of the field, and seeing themselves in the mirror, like children, they chose to look behind it. But don’t forget, dear friend, just before, the pride of our cooperation! And for all that, remember the field before the forest, before they broke the
civilzonnen
, where the voluntary reigns. It is almost exactly eighty meters long, sixty wide, and one inch deep, and in my lifetime I have enlarged it by twenty percent! As things get beyond that, sir, we are only custodians. There is no return on capital.” The double harness hung like a gallows rope in his hands. “It’s time for a little lunch, and a bit of oblivion,” he announced without emotion.

As the Professor followed Father into the White Wings, Black Dog, he noted a small, hand-painted sign above the door.

The jolly, almost-too-rosy serving girl waved them back to
The Brainery
with a butter knife. While all their fellow diners were male, the room itself had an eternally feminine quality. Disdainful of mere prettiness, the colors were sweetly mysterious shades of pale yellow, which unfolded rather than pleased the eye, and the floating draperies blurred the precise lines of the room with profound sensuality. Just as they were seated in a green booth with curtains, a platter of tiny steaming birds, a woodcock fricassee, was brought to the table.

“Served only one week a year,” Father announced with a wink. “If a mouflon is shot in the mountains of Vop, it is brought here; if a fine salmon is hauled from the Augesee, it is packed in ice and brought here; if an especially fine jar of sheep’s milk cheese should appear in Chere Muchore, it is also brought here.”

Then the Professor was amazed to see his host lift up the tablecloth, and placing the platter in front of him, drape the cloth over his head and dish, making a tent so as to fully inhale their woodfern aroma. He did not reappear for fully ten minutes.

While Father was thus preoccupied, the Professor perused the menu, at the top of which was only the motto
“Hic Carnem Comedemius.”
(“We are not vegetarians here.”) Like a true dog’s dinner, it was divided not into courses or even genres: minced chick soup, larks in crumbles, sandpipers in gondolas, fish sausages, blancmange fritters, quince stew with scarlet jelly, griddlecakes with nut paste and Spanish wine. Marzipan love-flakes, macaroon trifle, refreshing fennel and almond essences, maraschino ices. Cockscombs in pagodas and champagne, turkeys daubed with stewed grapes, stuffed pike and river birds garnished with oysters. Aspic of carp with frog dumplings, calves’ ears stuffed with lamb gizzards, grilled peach stew with aniseed, collapsed yearling boar with creamed eggplant and pomegranate molasses. Oxtongue and asparagus ragout, parboiled artichoke bottoms piled with pounded duck livers. Young rabbits with anchovies, minute cold boned thrushes, salad of oranges, herbs, olives, and marigold petals. Braised doe-shanks glazed with sumac and hazelnuts, thrush pate with cardamom fritters, sheeps’ tongues in curled papers, boiled beef skirts rubbed with saltpeter and stuffed with snipe. Roe tarts with shrimps and partridges in their own juice, chilled eels in dill frockcoats, perch and baby quail patties, bass aghast in green garlic. Marrow fried in crumbs, minced pigeon in cream, pig trotters in milk, marshfed veal rubbed with mint and wild thyme in four stocks, and as a single concession to the French, an
omelette au joli coeur
.

At the bottom was an asterisked dish (“For guaranteed success in courting fair ladies”): sliced bear’s paw atop pork filet stuffed with chicken liver and rolled in bacon slices, garnished with truffles, onion rings, and pickles.

The Professor was about to order this intriguing dish, but once the woodcock had disappeared, the courses were simply brought without order, timing, or explanation. He had little idea what the dishes were until each new joy was consumed; then he could make out various layers, fragrances of unusual clarity superimposed on one another like a fugue, which made him want to live forever. Nor could he discern the various wines which were automatically poured, as the wine list was not only in an unknown language but an alphabet he had never seen. At one point he glanced up to the only art in the room, an embroidered pennant which announced:

The White Wings, Black Dog had a calculated double ambience in its strategy for exercising
goût
. The front rooms gave off to a courtyard hidden from the street where men and women sat whispering at tiny pearwood tables large enough for only a drink and an ashtray. Further inside were a series of pine booths arranged at angles to an enormous walk-in fireplace, partially lit even in August and hung with various kettles of stew from which one could serve oneself with a large, enameled tin plate. Occasionally a serving girl would slip out the back door with a huge knife, and after an incredible series of shrieks and squeals, something spitted and juicy would be turning over coals where just five minutes before a pot of chrysanthemums sat.

At the center of the room was a long bar in the shape of a quarter-moon where only first-time visitors stood, surrounded by a series of long common tables. Depending on the evening, here one might find an Astingi gelder, animal blood still fresh on his hands, in deep conversation with a befurred and bechained Foreign Minister Zich, his shooting break and his grays both emblazoned with a cadmium orange “Z.” Or the village doctor with his head in his hands. Or Öscar Ögur, passed out in a corner. Or Catspaw, trying and failing to make conversation with the most beautiful girl in the world, dressed in pink and white, and not once elevating her eyes from an edition of
The Count of Monte Cristo
. Aged Chetvorah, disdaining any scraps not given them by hand, stood arthritically on guard, displaying the white whorls on their chests like veterans’ medals.

The walls bore etchings of fossils found in the local sinkholes—wolves with broken backs, birds with every vertebrae of the wing exposed in a fan—and indeed the locals referred to the front rooms as “Utah,” in honor of the oldest known dog fossil found in North America, and the back room as “Arizona,” because no one knew a single thing about it except that it was pretty.

The front rooms, with their tobacco-colored curtains and sensory simplicity, had harbored every discreet silence, every tragic conversation, and every historical form of rowdiness, insult, and
affaire d’honneur
. To ask for water with one’s coffee were fighting words. Men were known to take a crust of Black Dog bread on their travels and sniff of it of an evening, should their thoughts take a melancholy turn. But no matter how savage or despairing the serial personal confrontations, if one stepped back to the bar, the general atmosphere invariably seemed comedic, if not exactly gay.

The Brainery, on the other hand, was not only more expensive and exclusive (anyone asking for a reservation was told it had closed for renovations), but devoted to reversing the historical sensation of Utah. Everything up close was comic, but toward the perimeter of the room the sense of loneliness was overwhelming, even though it held some fifty diners. Somehow the space had been acoustically devoted to changing the terms of conversation itself. Sentences curled about one another like smoke. If you paused for reflection, another voice finished or inverted your thought. Across the table, though his lips were moving, you didn’t hear a word your colocutor said, while your own voice came out of nowhere, from the wings, as it were, a stage whisper. As the courses progressed, it seemed one was going blind, the precondition for all real sensuality, until you could make out only the dim outline of your companion’s face. Two silent men with their mouths full might enjoy snatches of conversation not strictly their own. A lady might allow her partner to put his foot where he wished, but she would never ask to share his dessert or offer even a forkful of her zebra-eye salad. Indeed, one was never quite sure what was said, half-said, previously remembered, or later reflected upon. One could manage a seduction or an apology in the Brainery, but never win an argument or make a deal.

The effect of this irony-resistant fugue was calming rather than irruptive. Although most people in the room were unknown to each other, an unforgettable solidarity carried them into the night.

The two men ate conscientiously rather than with fervor, as if to arrive at ultimate conclusions only after complete evidence had been submitted. They ate without gulping, without flinching, without fatigue, drinking a new wine for each dish with perfect sang-froid.

The conversation slowed, though all subjects were permissible, save the events of the morning, and all manner of expression, excepting that of a low mood. The wine had done its work and their brains ceased to be machines for argument-winning, and our talkative species began a
conversation galante.

Throwing back his head and showing his Adam’s apple, Felix announced, “We are gorillas.”

“Dangerous gorillas!” the Professor toasted with his knife.

“Dangerous and ill-adapted,” Felix chorused.

“Our back isn’t right, tails in our trousers,” the Professor riposted gleefully. “Below the hips we are a mess, particularly women, and we clank when we walk!”

“We were almost extinct,” Felix assented vigorously, “and we have never forgotten it!”

The Professor suppressed a burp with his napkin and apologized. Felix waved the gaffe away. “It’s the lizard in us that does the breathing.”

And when they finished, there was no fanfare, no flinging of napkins, nothing but a slight settling back in the tenderly green banquettes. There arrived a small cart with various cheeses, ratafias,
eau-de-vie
, and cigars in an ingeniously ventilated box which exuded the scent of burning creole corpses.

“You will never hear me say a word against hunting again, my friend,” the Professor sighed, “of that you can be sure.”

Father smiled warmly but said only, “The forcemeat lacked half an onion and two sprigs of chervil.” Then he bit into a piece of soft cheese, but only halfway through. Taking the entire piece from his mouth with his fingers, he showed the indentations to his comrade. “
This
is who we are!”

They were a third of their way through their cheroots when there was an enormous crash of china and a serving girl’s astonished shriek, neither remarkable in the front room of White Wings, Black Dog. But the Professor noted that his host had removed his cigar, slightly elevated his nose, and opened his nostrils. There was further commotion in the outer rooms, as well as a tremendous muffled breathing, and then the Professor, too, his palette cleansed, noticed a delicate acid note in the air: tannins and singed fur. Then a dark flash against the pale yellow and a sound like a snare-drum as Rubato and Nimbus, matted with every seed, vine, and scum of the forest, tails raw, tongues lolling, whiskers twisted, ears bleeding, eyes protuberant, coats disheveled, stormed into the Brainery, and after circling the room and vaulting a wine cart, skidded to a stop before the banquette with a convulsive collective flounce, as if to say, “My God, what a pair of masters, eh!”

“Scoundrels!” Father muttered, though his eyes betrayed his relief.

At first the Professor politely refused the animals’ advances, but after Nimbus placed her lightly webbed paws on his chest and her haggard canine cheek against his own, snapping at his nose like a fly, he began to weep. “It’s just like patients, you see . . . they all run away, but mostly they come back.”

Felix remained cool. “And now, friend, you will see the famous horse imitation.”

And sure enough, the dogs’ square faces suddenly grew long and their mouths drooped, red haws exposed. They hung their heads, shivers undulating along their sides, as if a hundredweight of woe were pulling their noses to the ground, like some wreck of a worn-out cab-horse. But just as their noses touched the floor, they stretched their forelegs, lifted their hindquarters, spread out their hindlegs, and yawned deliriously in stark abstraction.