In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman
all in the body, sending out messages of concern without a sense of abandonment, a gesture usually only mastered by grandparents, and then only for brief, palsied moments.
“The animal, like society, must be taken into liberality without quite knowing it,” Felix spoke soberly as the wavelets left his hand. “It’s the only kind of progressivism that works.” And this indeed became well-known as the “Psalmanazar Method”: to trick the animal in question into self-determination, even magnanimity.
Noting at once the indifference of my father to his jostlings and strainings, Scharf arose trembling, and after relieving himself like a woman, soon settled into a forlorn, circuitous caricature of a gambol, which brought cheers from the Professor and calls for his family. The women returned as one from the brook, as if in a frieze, and watched without the slightest reaction as Father and Scharf slunk in circles around the lawn, negotiating the hydrangeas and boxwood mazes, demonstrating, as the wavelets of energy traveled along the rope, that as dark as the gulf was between them, it was dotted with tiny synapses of fire, and that torpor and hysteria might be transformed with gentle firmness into an acceptable sort of common misery.
Felix brought the dog to a cringing heel before his family.
“Should you find him insupportable, sir, this dog will be just as much at home in an institution as within the dynamics of a family,” Father said genially, handing the rope back to the Professor, and with the other hand offering him a mug of spiked tea. Scharf immediately toppled over on his back and gazed up at the concerned assembly, his head grotesquely twisted to one side, his tongue curled like a scallop in the roof of his hideous mouth. Ainoha suggested a remove to the terrace, where they could more comfortably continue their observation of his progress.
At the end of the day, when the question of money always arises, the Professor suggested a barter arrangement of medical services. Felix as usual insisted on cash up front, noting that he had never been sick a day in his life, and adding, “To tell the truth, no one ever gets ill out here.”
The Professor seemed glum. “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” he muttered aloud.
“It’s not that you won’t find a cheaper rate,” Father said brightly. “However, you will not find a discipline and dedication such as my own at any price.”
The Professor smiled as if to himself. “The dog himself cost nothing. It is the training that is so expensive!”
“It is an expensive business to take responsibility for a nutcase,” Father said without missing a beat. “What other investment does a human make in a dependent who will require your attention every waking hour for half a generation or more, and then congratulate himself when the dependent gets ill that he has saved a few marks? No one will pay the price for careful breeding. I sell my own dogs for a thousand gulden, and I have a ten-year waiting list.”
“I myself would very much prefer to wait ten years, Councilor, but my daughter cannot. Surely, you understand that I cannot simply turn Scharf out. She will accept no substitution.”
“I quite understand the problem, Professor. But the real cost—I say this to you, mano a mano—of demanding total adulation is something you will come to hate.”
“I leave my dog with you,” the Professor huffed, a new bond already established between him and his pet, “and you ask for money as well?” Then he snapped on his homburg in a gesture of virility.
“This is a graver business than you might imagine, my dear sir. Health requires a commitment to being well. How much, for example, do you yourself charge for a sitzung?”
The Professor gazed at his family, glanced at the rope now coiled about his forearm, then looked my father up and down. “Twenty golden marks,” he said quietly.
Felix whistled slowly through his teeth. He gave Scharf ’s ear a gentle tug, for the first time reversing the flow of energy. The depressed saddle of the animal rose and his low-hocked rear legs straightened as he licked his hand. “Then it’s agreed?”
The Professor pulled his beard and replied he would have to think upon it. “It’s quite an exhausting journey, you know,” he added.
“Yes, of course,” Felix said. “But please understand, there can be no guarantees with this animal. It will take a long time and a bundle of money, and even then he will not be quite right. Don’t try to play games with him, because you’re going to lose and make yourself look bad. You can’t impress him. You can’t discourage him. You can’t embarrass him. None of the techniques you generally use with people are going to work with him. The best we can hope for is that he will live out his days with some semblance of social dignity. But first you must get your own family under control. The poor animal is getting mixed signals.”
They agreed to meet again, sans famille, in a month’s time, during which the Professor promised to stop hauling on the animal, and to have all the children practice sending out energy in compliant units along the rope in the manner proscribed, practicing first upon a bed post. They finally compromised on the fee arrangement—a full physical workup in Therapeia with the very latest techniques in diagnoze, in return for a month’s trial training—to which my father agreed more out of curiosity than anything, and the family returned by calèche to catch the last steamer, just before a stream of black thunderheads exploded over the Marchlands.
FATHERLAND
(Iulus)
My father, Felix Aufidius, was an exceptionally energetic and experienced fellow, athletic, gregarious, and priapic, an intense and watchful man with enormous inner territory, infinitely careless yet terribly focused. A hard-drinking old depucelator, an homme de femme who got better-looking as he aged, his angular features were increasingly apparent in the faces of peasant children throughout the county of Klavier. And may I say it was disconcerting to encounter your own little doppelgangers playing in the dusty streets of every village, as I became gradually aware that in effect I was the unwilling leader of a lost tribe. Felix was a big warm man with a smooth cold cheek, often with a heart-shaped lipstick smudge where his beard began. I wished to exceed him only as a tippler and a flirt, and would have happily donned his poisoned shirt.
Born into that century when humankind never worked harder, Felix was known locally as the only Protestant east of the Mze, the quickest gestalt to the west of it, and also as something of a Marxisant—at least to the extent that he agreed that the aim of man was to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner.” He was the only man I ever knew who roared with laughter when in the clutches of Das Grosse Kapital. “There are certain mistakes, which only an intellectual can make,” he often said. And if he could have chosen his epitaph, it would have read: “He had brains but not too many.”
In his den (and that word sums it up perfectly), a black velvet curtain bisected the oak-paneled tower suite, on each side of which he pinned quotes from his favorite authors, which he made me memorize, such as this one from the down-to-earth Red Prussian:
In place of the great historic movements arising from the conflict between the productive forces . . . in place of practical and violent action by the masses . . . in place of this vast, prolonged and complicated movement, Monsieur Proudhon supplies the evacuating motion of his own head.
I was in my fifties before I got the gist of that, near Felix’s own age when he clipped it. It was a reminder note that the most difficult intellectual work of all is like that of an unperplexed matador—to allow reality to step forward, then coolly sidestep it.
And I see now that the rote tutorial was apt, for our sensation of history is indeed nothing more than a great black velvet curtain onto which, along with a few sepia cupolas, haunting autoportraits, and vanished landscapes, a great number of pithy quotes have been flimsily pinned. Yet it is only against that opaque curtain of garbled out-of-context aphorisms that individual character can be truly developed, and those who refuse to stand before it never really emerge. Best to ponder it at midnight with some absinthe before a roaring fire.
My greatest joy was rifling