In Partial Disgrace (9 page)

The gig burst around the crest of the volcano, flying through the translucidity. Father noted with relief that the Professor had arrived alone, as promised, though the springs of the lilac gig still seemed weighted down with the memory of their collective despondency. Yet in the boot stood a different dog, pure Alsatian by appearances, tied with the same rope. Rearing up on his hindlegs, the animal jerked his head like a parrot, looping strings of spittle across the Professor’s black homburg, and as the gig swung to an abrupt stop, the dog toppled out and hung, eyes bulging, tongue a royal purple, until Felix cut him slack.

The Professor seemed more downcast and disoriented than on his first visit, but nevertheless rushed over before Felix could say a word, vigorously pumping his hand while explaining that Scharf had suddenly sniffed freedom, broken away from his wife on the evening walk, and been cut in two by an electric tram. The Professor, driven wild by his sobbing women, had gotten a replacement the very next day from the
doghaus
, though in this admission Felix could discern no real grief or contrition. And it did not bode well, he noted, that the present dog, despite being in such evident pain, had not cried out.

Ainoha had prepared a hare fricassee for lunch, and Felix was happy enough to postpone investigation of the Alsatian, tying him to the axle on a short lead with a slipknot, hoping no doubt the dog might do away with himself. When asked why he had again chosen a companion for life who had been so obviously and cruelly abandoned, the Professor could only say that the
doghaus
officials had assured him that the animal was of the noblest, purest stock, the absolute favorite of a landed Russian family of the finest northern German origin, the sort of people who had kept their servants standing in the orangery with torches throughout the killing frosts of the recent troubles, and when rightly alarmed by the czar’s appointment of a parliament, had hastily emigrated by freighter from Odessa, and now lived in the most reduced condition in the Therapeia ghetto, where they had reluctantly turned over the Alsatian, their last proud possession, to the care of the state. The long sea voyage had no doubt unsettled the animal, the
doghaus
officials opined, but his superior breeding would undoubtedly resurface once the trauma of losing his fortune and his homeland, as well as his constipation, subsided.

Felix put on his gamest face throughout this exculpation, interjecting only that with this animal, at least the nature of the abuse was clear, as was often the case with tumbled aristocrats. However, after coffee on the terrace, the Alsatian bit him fiercely when untied.

“You see—the children call him Wolf!” the Professor fairly shouted.

Father bore pain as well as any man I ever saw, and with one hand still clamped in the brute’s jaws, staunched the flow of blood with his free hand, somehow making out of his pocket-handkerchief a tourniquet. If the Professor was embarrassed, he was also plainly intrigued by his host’s ambidextrous stoicism, which gave his apology—signaled by the arc of his eyebrows—a rather forced and detached air, his curiosity overcoming his identification with another’s misfortune, which any normal person would of course find quite unforgivable.

Felix decided to rescue a bad situation by making it didactic. He allowed his encaptured hand to go limp as a fish in Wolf ’s mouth, then gave it a friendly shake or two. Realizing that he had perhaps overreacted, the dog reconsidered the amputation, which, as Father was wont to demonstrate, could also be a kindness. The Alsatian’s ears arched as he released Felix’s hand with a small pop, a string of saliva tinged with blood still conjoining them.

The Professor, however, had apparently decided to inflict a public punishment on the cur, and took up Wolf ’s rope, coiling it about his arms and swinging the knotted end above his head
a la gaucho
. But before he could administer the chastisement, the animal lowered his head and began to pull like a mule, first in one direction and then in another, causing the Professor’s patent leather shoes to screech on the gravel like chalk on a blackboard. He glanced imploringly at Felix, throwing up his one free hand in a gesture of disbelief. And then, as if to certify the case, the shortened lead was snapped even more anarchically, until Wolf, wheezing against his collar with unbelievable persistence, lowered his shoulders, turned his toes in and elbows out, and with gravel flying from his paws, became a classic study in time and motion. The Professor managed to emit a deep sigh before he was again, as on his first visit, forced to his knees, but this time also flung forward on his face. Succeeding in making his point, Wolf immediately sat down and licked the considerable foam from the corners of his mouth, one yellow eye wandering like an expiring nova.

“You see,” the Professor groaned, lying on his stomach, “he wants to leave us! There is no master in this house.” The dog had yet to emit as much as a grunt.

Felix folded his arms and delivered his lay opinion that the dog had been pulled on so much that his natural impulse was now to pull himself, wanting like anyone to put a little loop into his future. And he could play this game only by exhausting his tenacious master. The good news was that the dog in question was not timid, not a layabout like dear departed Scharf. His illness was simply an inappropriate response to the stress of everyday life.

“He doesn’t want to run away, Herr Doktor. He just wants some slack.” The Professor took this in gravely and repeated it to himself as if he were translating from a foreign language.

“Then he’s not . . . a revolutionary?”

“If so, a very poor one.”

Closing one brown eye and rising to a knee, the Professor opined that perhaps the freedom and fresh air of Cannonia might ameliorate the situation. Felix shook his head slowly.

“When a bear is uncultured, you do not tie him in a forest.”

This brought forth from the Professor a huge shrug, as if from his very soul, signifying, “What is to be done, then?”

Felix looked the Professor in the eye and reached into an inside jacket pocket, where he always kept a delicate choke collar of the tiniest blueblack Dresden steel ringlets. He held the collar up for his client as a jeweler holds a necklace for the bride, making a shimmering circle of dark silver and iron.

“Training, Herr Doktor Professor, tra
inin
g,” he whispered, trilling the
n
s.

My father was a man of many pockets: one for tobacco, one for sweets, one for the Dresden collar, one for dry husks of bread, and one from which he now withdrew a crimson kerchief, which he knotted around his neck. He needed to work the dog without distraction, so he ushered the Professor into the house, where, not finding Mother at home, the visitor could be seen in the staircase window, faded and grave as in a daguerreotype. Through the leaded glass, he watched the two murky figures in the courtyard.

At first, Felix slowly circled the panting, spittleflecked Alsatian, moving with his back against a dark green privet hedge. Then he held up a husk of bread.

“Komin
zee
heer, Wolfie.”

Trailing his rope, the dog approached tentatively, but then took the husk from Felix’s hand and walked about sniffing and scratching it like a chicken, while occasionally peering over his shoulder at the knotted rope, then back at his immaculate food source. Felix continued to pass out husks with one hand, while with the other he opened a large flapped pocket that had been lined with surgical rubber so that the blood of game might easily be removed. (He had one sewn in all his jackets, evening clothes included.) From this otherwise empty game pocket he now withdrew a strand of insulated electrical wire as long as he was tall. My grandfather Priam had refused to install electricity at Semper Vero, and the week after he died, his wife, age spots on her temples as large as silver dollars, had the entire house and every outbuilding wired, socketed, and telephoned. It was this original telephone wire—flexible yet holding a shadow of the shape your hands might give it—Felix now held, a line without hard edges which could be looped or straightened, and along which willed energy might run like no other conductor, alternating impulses of discipline and freedom.

Gently, he looped the steel ringlets about Wolf ’s neck, attached the telephone cord to one ring, and keeping plenty of slack, strolled along the privet hedge. Wolf grimaced and dug in, preparing to haul his newest interlocutor beyond the horizon. But just as the lead grew taut, Felix turned his wrist a quarter-turn, and keeping his elbow stationary, gave a delicate if abrupt jerk, as if he were scything through a single stalk of wheat. The Dresden collar slipped through itself and the ringlets popped tight on Wolf ’s larynx, emitting a click like a cartridge being chambered.

The dog’s eyes bulged, then he coughed politely, and rather than hauling stopped short. As he did so, the collar slipped back open and the cord went slack. Wolf was fleetingly aware of a parenthesis of liberation, the triumph of cessation, that moment when your lover allows you to take her by the throat while your own head is cradled in her hands like a melon.

Then my father coiled the cord, leaving the collar hanging loose, and Wolf walked beside him calmly, looking up occasionally in disbelief, as the figure in the window broke into silent applause, then raced down the staircase.

“To touch the compulsion,” the Professor expostulated breathlessly, “is near enough the soul . . . And you didn’t even have to hurt him!”

“I will never hurt him,” Father said evenly. “You must trust me.”

“The question is whether
I
can bear it,” the Professor sighed. For the first time his tone was somewhat jocular. “I only fear that he will come to prefer you.”

“These are the chances we all must take. Who knows who deserves whose loyalty? What do you want most of all, sir? What is your greatest wish for the dog in question?”

“I want him . . . to
stay
,” the Professor mused, “or if not precisely stay, at least not run from me.”

“You must not confuse running away with hauling. The question, I believe, is not one of disappearing, but of constantly jerking you about.”

“I still do not see how force . . . such manipulation can accomplish anything lasting.”

“Ah, well, don’t you see, it’s just the right amount of force, applied at exactly the right time and place. It takes a lifetime to learn, if I may say so.”

“Will you teach it to me, then?”

“Ah, my friend, you are not ready. Humans don’t have the sense to submit. The dog bites only hard enough to make a point. Yes, we think dogs almost human, and dogs think we are other dogs. Which do you think is closer to the truth? Remember St. Augustine: you won’t see God until you become as a little dog. When you are ready, the teacher will appear. That I guarantee.”

“I suppose you mean that we learn only by punishment!” the Professor intoned morosely.

“Not exactly. We learn by the threat of a thrashing administered against a background of love. Think of it as a loving withdrawal. Even gentleness must be enforced.”

“I still do not comprehend your preliminary diagnosis.”

“Well, if it’s analogy you want, I should say that what we have here is the soul of a horse trapped in the body of a dog.”

“Then poor Wolf believes himself to be a horse?”

“No. He knows he’s not a horse. He just wants to feel like a horse, because he believes the horse to be superior.”

“I’m not sure I grasp . . .”

“It’s like this. You don’t want a bottle of wine, do you? No, you want the feeling it gives. What we’re saying to Wolfie is, go right ahead and feel like a horse if you like. Just don’t behave like one when you’re around me.”

“This is hardly scientific, Councilor.”

“Ah, dear friend, facts may be different, but feelings are the same. And it’s not the thinking that’s hard. It’s selling the thinking, Herr Professor.”

“In my experience,” the Professor muttered defensively, “one can often observe in human illness the neuroses of the animals.”

“Perhaps. But the satisfying thing about dogs is that they fear what actually happens, not fear itself. Therefore, the teacher must constantly fight his way into reality, all the while maintaining detachment.”

“But how can we proceed before we locate the trauma, immaterial as it may be?”

“What do we start with, you say? My poor self and this poor dog. That is all. Our origins are different, our values are different, our ends are different. They are all incompatible and they cannot be pushed beyond their limits. But they can be imaginatively understood, if there is a cord, a simple cord.”

“It seems, if I may say so, a project fraught with risk.”

“Whenever you weigh beauty and utility on the same scale, a kind of genetic civil war is created within the animal. When you are stronger, I will elucidate the costs and lessons.”

“But might a dog behave and not be well?”

“We are not concerned with the whole animal, because that leads us into ideology. Life is all concealed pistols and waxed slipknots, Professor. All we can manage is to make the dog face the facts.”

“The verdict, then; I tremble.”

“Ah, Wolf is so much a product of our time. The greater he contests your authority, the greater his need for authority. His willfulness is mirrored back at him, and he becomes even more disappointed with himself. The result is discontent without reference, for which there is no answer. All we have is demand—perverse, obstinate, insoluble, interminable demand! And so the therapy can never end. Are you prepared for such an outcome?”

The Professor walked in circles, squinting and pulling on his moustache.

“It would appear, Councilor, that I have little choice in the matter.”

Smoking their cigars, they walked arm in arm along the darkening river. Wolf and I gamboled after them, tripping one another up. I threw a stick in the water and the dog looked at me with disdain. He was getting better already.

“It’s all so vague and problematical,” the Professor mused. “How do you stand it, Councilor?”

“The transferal is incomplete, my friend, it is always incomplete. It’s the nature of the mechanism.”