In Partial Disgrace (39 page)

The fact of the matter is that most agents
never
learn anything of consequence in their entire careers and so must continually inflate the significance of their observations—a driving force of history which makes the class struggle look like a game of whist. Young men seeking academic promotion, old men seeking publicity—all of it worthless rot, worthless, worthless. Thus, espionage is mostly the story of some poor fellow being shadowed by another, and who by throwing away his brown paper lunch bag invites a generation of tortured analysis and brilliant speculation. What was remarkable about Iulus is that he never inflated his own significance, never gave undue meaning to his dreary routines. To climb the ladder in this business you must entertain the last conclusion that you would expect your training and temperament to lead you to, and that is this: The world in fact does not depend in the end of the individuality of the speaker, but upon the transmission of
other
voices, which somehow overflow into our world.

Now the intelligence fraternity has taken a great deal of abuse in recent years, and while I can hardly add a laurel to their brow, I ought to point out that they were often ahead of their time. By this I mean that they were among the first to suffer from the affliction primarily responsible for the disintegration of the modern personality—when the ability to collect information greatly outstrips our ability to make any sense of it. I myself must confess that I do not know of a single decision, personal or political, which can be improved by more information. The modern way to keep a secret secret is, after all, to surround it with trivia. Information makes it easier to mask real events and hide meaning. Ours is the age of ultimate, unobtrusive continual surveillance. Never before have so many been overheard and so much written down. Never before has behavior been so closely observed and recorded. And yet never in history was there a vaster contrast between the extraordinary precision of our diagnosis, and the recalcitrance of the data from which nothing could be learned, much less prognosticated. The most difficult thing in history is to ascertain motive, and you will not find me trying to account for it. As the great Dickens has said, “Most people cannot read character, and the greatest of all their mistakes is to mistake shyness for arrogance.”

In any event, when I came to make summaries of Iulus’s work for my aegis of superiors—the inter-office memo is truly the cruelest art form—pressure began to mount. Various directorates came into conflict. The Office of Damage Assessment dismissed it as magical fantasy. The Office of Imagery Analysis believed it to be enigmatically coded reality. Now you won’t catch me pulling that Anaxagorian banality, that the world is a mixture of the real and imagined. It’s simply that
all
war reminiscences are exchanges of the fake with the genuine, and it’s quite impossible to tell the difference. My final task was to divide it up on a “need-to-know” basis between our specialized warriors, and to elicit their cramped annalistic initials in the proper box. But boxes are boxes precisely because they are meant to convey something besides boxes, and they did not appreciate my reminding them of this.

For my own part, it was difficult to police a project in which I was so thoroughly engrossed. Indeed, intelligence-wise, within Iulus’s larger candor, there was no hidden conundrum, enigma, or agenda. The deeper one went into it, there seemed to be nothing but
more
tact and
more
discretion. Even the most worried reading revealed no breaches of faith or security; it resisted utterly any allegorical partiality. The most bizarre matters were related in the most matter-of-fact manner, as if to remind us that it is only the most fantastical tales which have direct historical equivalence, while it is the banal tissue of everyday documentary coherence which is totally fabricated. If you really believe you have made something up, it only means that you haven’t looked far enough, in my experience. “Imagination” is simply the relation of another person’s memory that can’t be exactly retrieved. There was nothing, you will notice, not even a proper name, which might compromise a personality, much less an agent. (In the summaries made by the lady copyists, every human and place name was left blank to be later written in by hand at a higher directorate.) Whatever else it was, this was no crank’s fiction or self-serving confessional. It addressed itself to the seniormost level, yet it wore its authority easily and remained accessible to the most peripheral of participants. Its sheer number of heroes and heroines might well overwhelm the dubious and jaded contemporary reader, but Iulus was the only man I knew who lived a truly fascinating life and wasn’t a boring writer. His work made you forget the injunction whereby you had come to read it—the highest praise you can give a document.

In all honesty I have forgotten in the press of other duties exactly how it was further processed. What I
never
forgot was the effect of the whole—as when you read too profound a book at too early an age, and all you can recall about it was that it required a new level of concentration, that brief and glorious lost time in everyone’s life, when you are watching yourself get smarter. I understand that this will sound of exclusivity to contemporary ears, but at my age I cannot muster a suitable self-effacing apologia. My trembling hand is quite democratic enough. These days, I rather go in for being misunderstood.

There is still no good explanation as to why a man who sprang from a people who loved silence above everything should suddenly come out of his commodious closet and reveal himself. The intelligence community, like the literary, remains divided on the issue; professors and spooks competing as usual for the lowest esteem of their fellow citizens, as they trawl literature for moral fishies.

Devotees of economic man speculated that his cash flow was cut off. The psychological fraternity inferred that he experienced a crise de conscience. The Third Estate believed the book to be a hedge against betrayal by his sources. And literary folk worried about his intentions, only to dismiss them as irrelevant. Their methods leave no leeway for a personality who remains a mystery but who was also unafraid of any ethical test. Some have said he was a greater man than a writer. Well, who isn’t?

But certainly he was not giving himself up or away. Only an American could believe in that sort of historical resolution. Pzalmanazar passed messages as most of us mere mortals pass water. And whatever we found of his, we “intercepted” it when he wanted us to
.

I believed, in short, that the release of his papers was meant to mark the historical top in the snooze of the all-powerful. If Iulus was now fully awake, would it be long before, at long last, reality would step forward in America, all the contracts redrawn, and incredibility be recognized? It was time to cash out. Cannonia had a tryst with Destiny and her girlfriend Fate. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps and America comes into its tenth generation, Cannonia will wake to life and freedom.

So when the Company asked me to prepare a final digest, reduce his ten-thousand page opus to a bland four-page summary, I saw that any appreciation of Pzalmanazar imperiled simplification as well as my station. The sophistication of his observations simply could not be paraphrased. A memoir without hindsight? A meditation on the inherent wildness of history? A novel for people who hate novels?

It was finally conceded that the only man we could hire capable of tracking him down was himself . . . and his code name was changed to “Lost King.” (None could spell or pronounce “Iulus” anyway.) It was as if our two selves were rushing to meet across history, but as I closed the distance and reached out my hand, I saw that he had been walking away from me backward the entire time. The best I could do was put real people into situations that probably did not exist, which after all is what history is all about. And so I reluctantly ran this summary up their flagpole:

That snake in their lunchbucket cost me plenty. Having been routinely told to forget everything I learned, I resolved now to earn my pay by garrulating elaborately on what I had formerly denied I knew. But Iulus the author, if not the agent, was soon forgotten, and I, supposedly so severe and disinterested, controlled the files.

Don’t get the wrong idea, but yes, Traveler, I fell for him.

GENTLEMEN ERRANT

(Iulus)

Much of the next month was spent in expeditions to gather up Father’s manuscript. I climbed the tops of trees, Mother slashed her way with a saber through beargrass and thistlesage, platoons of hired hands were sent six abreast across the fields, while Catspaw and Öscar tracked with a pair of Chetvorah. The brambles dripped with our bloody dew.

Some pages were found floating on the stagnant face of the Mze, others plastered on the gnarled boles of great oaks, still others nailed like theses on a nest of thorns. The black velvet curtain in the study had been stripped of its quotes, the neat piles of manuscript scattered, the chess piece paperweights overturned. The vortex had even turned pictures to the wall. Clothesline was strung throughout the den, and every available paperclip and safety pin had been recruited to dangle dry the smeared pages. About a third of the manuscript appeared to be lost. For the first time in history, dogs were barred from his tower suite, and Father was in a low mood.

After one of these expeditions, our disconsolate crew was seated on the front stairs when a shabby closed carriage appeared through the lime trees at the end of the drive, driven by a not-so-excellent specimen of Skopje in a wide-brimmed hat, transporting a man dressed in
tête de nègre
and accompanied by what appeared to be two equally black bear cubs. Thinking it was perhaps a rich gypsy with his road show, Father reached in his pocket for the smallest change, then squinted in disbelief as the Professor and his charges hove into view.

No words were exchanged as the Professor dismounted and the black balls of fluff bounded out and immediately began to tear at each other’s throats on the gravel, a fight beyond anything witnessed in our animal world. They couldn’t have been more than six months old, their teeth and claws hardly more than cartilage, yet strings of blood and spittle flew in the air, and from a brief glimpse of the set of the jaws, Father recognized a fight to the death among embryos was ensuing, and that no human hand, no matter how courageous, could separate them. The Professor himself seemed paralyzed. Mother mobilized me—luckily enough, the garden hose had been laid out that morning across the drive like a mamba, and the jet of cold water broke the dogs’ rage, shocking them into a civilized stupor and leaving them sprawled in the gravel at a third of their former size, the soaked black fur settled about their still-soft skeletons. With almond eyes they regarded the gashes in each other’s throats.

“Sisters?” Father asked cheerfully, and the Professor nodded curtly. “Chows?” Father inquired..

“Chow chows,” the Professor adumbrated..

“Yours?”

“The Prinzessin’s royal stock—a gift. The very finest. I couldn’t be prouder.”

Father refused to touch the dogs or try to ingratiate himself in any way. He instructed Öscar to isolate them and dress their wounds.

Both men were still inwardly seething from the Professor’s proffer made and refused at the Black Dog, and Father curtly waved his confrere inside, apparently not wishing to lose control in front of the family.

The Count’s visit before the storm had, as always, been brief and to the point. Count Zich was the proudest man in Cannonia, his ancestors clan chieftains and margraves when the Hohenzollerns were still goatherds. He was greatly respected throughout the country not for his wealth, station, or political power, but because he was a world-class pianist who only performed for his friends at parties, never in public. He had just come from one performance, apparently, his stiff dress shirt protruding from his lintwhite duster, smelling of rockrose, veal, and lavender water. His still-dark hair was slicked back, but his sidechops were as white as his starched shirtcuffs. His soft boots were of the same yellow leather as the fringed harness of his grays. And his malacca cane was topped with the ivory figure of a defecating mountain goat. The Count’s immense composure relaxed everyone. He always took his seat facing east, where his ancestors had been kings. Ainoha lay on the chaise lounge in pantaloons
à la turk
, her long clay pipe nested between her breasts. Father was bolt upright in his favorite chair, smoking a straight pipe but letting it droop sideways from his mouth, as if it were curved. And even the dogs, feigning sleep, had their ears cocked for what was to come.

It seemed that the Count’s vast network of spies, whose main brief was to keep his friends out of trouble, had alerted him to certain delinquencies in the tax rolls of Semper Vero, and while Zich had covered these with his own funds, he thought it best to personally urge a sober retrenchment upon his
camarade
. As an afterthought, he mentioned the fact that as Europe and Asia had broken the peace, funds for a general mobilization might require some two thousand million imperials. And then as a second afterthought, he opened the monogrammed leather briefcase which never left his side, revealing a gold telegraph key, a small ivory composing keyboard of one and a half octaves, as well as a piano roll, and with incredible nonchalance, his beautiful, beringed hands tapped out a precautionary message in C-minor to the army (Caparison the horses, lower all border toll gates) with a coded variant to the king at Umfallo. Then, swearing everyone to secrecy, he confided the latest coup of his intelligence service, the shocking information that the Americans were about to outlaw drinking! this ominous news producing general incredulity.

The Count was not surprised when his hosts expressed little anxiety about a potential conflict. Indeed, the attitude of everyone he had talked with, including his ministers, seemed to be one of inevitability, even enthusiasm. When he mentioned that the Russians might be drawn into an invasion, Ainoha said only, “Well, let them.”

As he took his leave, Count Zich asked Felix to use his influence with the gentry to prevent them from withdrawing funds from the savings banks. Should a war ultimatum be necessary, he would ask him to journey to Malaka and make his independent judgment available to King Peveny.

“This thing could be started by a bird’s chirp,” he confided. The grays fairly tore down the drive.

That evening, abed in Mother’s suite, Felix felt gaseous as lightning struck about his heart. But the thought of summoning Dr. Pür and being in his debt was too much to bear, and indeed, the small stroke he suffered seemed to calm him for the morning’s horrific discovery, when he found his white book wound tight about the blackened whale ribs of his estate.

After organizing our battalions of woe to run down his papers, Felix locked himself in the den for a month, admitting only Öscar with victuals, drink, ink, twine, and the daily quota of rescued manuscript. He leafed back through his
Chronik
and did the sums. Count Zich was quite right of course: there was not a liquid farthing to his name, and even after deducting advertising and meals, the training project, begun so innocuously with the advertisement in the Sunday
Tagblatt
a year ago, had through its cash drain forced him into general default. He asked himself what god, what madness had brought him to Cannonia, but did not have the strength to actually write this in the margins.

As one should know by now, blows of fate had the opposite effect upon Father as on most people. His mountains did not blow their tops, but rather fell ruined into themselves. His reaction was a sort of reverse hysteria, a chilling focus and self-control, the eerie calm of the sniper, and his abandoning of projects was most meticulous. He studied the
Chronik
for some days, arriving at a fair value for Semper Vero and all its dependencies, and detailing each asset, put the sheaf in the secret drawer holding the burnt-edged half-scraps of the Professor’s partially discarded lucubrations.

He then began a maniacal cleanup, discarding books and journals he would never read again, dusting, scrubbing, polishing, and painting, as if his rooms were a yacht. So when the Professor entered, ducking under the reams of stained and drying manuscript, he beheld a chamber nearly devoid of its old charm and eccentricity. On the large cherry table, once piled high with papers and indescribable objects of every sort, there was now only some perfectly coiled telegraph wire, a green accountant’s shade, and a pistol. There were also three large bronze-lipped vessels, one filled with Charbah Negra, one with golden water from the Mze, and a middle one, empty. These limpid, liquid pools flung discs of reflected light about the newly whitewashed ceiling. The black velvet curtain had been drawn together to a fraction of its former breadth, revealing a new set of empty, gilded cubbyholes to memorialize the lost transitions of the manuscript, but in its dark folds I was to discover later the first new quote, I think from
The
Aeneid
:

A gleaming bronze telescope and its tripod had been placed on the balcony, the only place now free of the rustle of warped paper. Across the bitter river, a file of Astingi were moving, not en masse but in an endless single column, streaming beautifully as the Mze once did.

“Have a look,” Father said, adjusting the telescope so the Professor could glimpse a few of their faces close-up: hollow-cheeked with emerald eyes and unkempt hair, aquiline jawbone, nose and brow decisively but delicately finished, the Ur-Goyim departing. What struck one was neither their military nor sportive rituals, but the ultimate distinction of their manners in looks and bearing, their reckless tempo and lack of fuss, their almost preposterous patrician mien
,
which made even the most elegant modern courtier seem hopelessly gloomy and plebeian in our spoilt eyes.

“Sometimes,” Father mused, “I think they are the last real people left on the face of the earth.”

The Professor did not take the bait, and believing he had achieved a kind of trump with ownership of the royal chows, began tentatively, hoping to break the ice.

“Is it a book then . . . that you’re working on?”

“I wouldn’t call it a book, really.” Felix replied evenly, his knuckles white on the balcony railing.

“But through all our talks, you’ve never once mentioned it!” the Professor, now truly hurt, blurted mournfully. “How can that be?” Then the question authors dread above all others:

“Pray, what’s it about?”

Father pointed silently across the river at the column heading East.

“A fine
spektakel,
no doubt, but do not you think it a waste of time to write about barbarians doomed to disappear?”

“Exactly what Marcus Aurelius thought upon this very spot, dear Doktor.”

“On the edge of the ancient world, you choose to write about the only people
without
a history?”

“They lost their written language some time ago,” Felix said softly without turning. “I aim to give it back to them before they depart.”

“But surely this is a project that with . . . fresh capital . . . might best be finished in southern France, or even Italy.”

“I moon not for your
vie méditerranée
,” Father said without edge. “Oxen and wainwrights could not drag me away from here. I appreciate you playing the fool the other day, but despite your ineffectual gallantry, you’re still not ready for a Chetvorah.”

“Not ready,” the Professor said sarcastically, “or not deserving, Councilor?”

“Ah, always the
justiz
business, eh, Herr Doktor?”

The Professor let this pass with a superior glance, and Felix felt his self-control slipping away.

“I find it passing strange, Herr Doktor, that of all the girls in the world, you would attach yourself to this, this brace of chowlets from the uncircumsized East.”

The Professor was unperturbed. “That’s quite the point: the Prinzessin traces them back to the eleventh century
BC
. They are the true ancestors of the basic breed, migrated from the Arctic Circle. They joined us in our time of troubles, the glacial age, when hair was hair.”

“I see that the Princess has been reading
Popular Dogs
,” Father enjoined. “But how far back must we go, Herr Doktor? Could we just for a moment climb out of prehistory and concentrate, say, on something more admissible? Their parentage, for example?”

“Lun and Jofi,” the Professor announced, “are of the Tartoum line.” And he handed over the pedigree papers like a military messenger under artillery fire.

“Tartoum?” Father interjected. “British stock!” Then, placing his pale hand on Professor’s shoulder, he made preparations for a long, soft soliloquy. “Let us go and do some lineage work,” and they passed directly across the library, now shaded by a huge tree of manuscript fluttering in the breeze. Felix offered nothing by way of hospitality, and the Professor’s usual martial walk became tentative. He suspected that he was not adventuring that day, but trespassing. The chows’ violence had released some unspeakable aura into the air. Father sat him down behind his desk as he scanned the dogs’ papers.

“One shouldn’t make too much of this, but I can tell you now that these dogs will never get along. There are forces here, a jealousy say, that is well beyond our control, and you are going to have to choose between the two. But let’s defer that. You seem to forget that in this part of the world we have a certain sensitivity to visits from the East, and that your fondness for the Ice Age neglects the somewhat more contemporary fact that it was precisely these dogs, with their black tongues and stiff gait, who accompanied the Tartars on their raids. And so, for hereabouts, they are the veritable symbol of Asiatic carnage. I’m surprised that they weren’t shot right out of your carriage. If word got around, I could have my whole kennel poisoned. So I must ask you to remove . . . I forget their names—the girls—by darkfall, and to return without them.”

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.