In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman
Virgil, Eclogues
IN DARKEST CANNONIA
(Rufus)
I fell into that hermit kingdom carelessly, the chute shuddering above me as the shroudlines cut my hands. Below, the rivers rested in their courses, like wine from a broken urn; above, the stars ran backward in the upper air. Cinching up my harness, I drifted trembling toward the signal bonfire and my contact—a man apart, devoted to his mission, whose realm would become my destiny, as ours would be his fate. But buffeted by cruel crosswinds, blows from the powers of the air, I was dragged toward shores of black milk, skipping like a stone through the dark and empty land. Palms turned to the stars, I cursed my gods, mentally settled my affairs, and muttered an incoherent prayer: Give me your hand.
Grinding teeth and bloodied mouth a howl, I made out two horrific shapes hurtling toward me, two spotless dogs drawing near with unimaginable speed. One attacked the chute, deflating the billowing silk beneath his body; the other was in the air above me, all red mustachios, golden eyes, and ivory fangs. Was I to be saved from death by drowning only to be torn apart by devil dogs? We rolled and wallowed, my lapels in the brute’s jaws, until we finally came to rest, his forepaws crossed upon my chest, rearquarters raised up, cropped tail awhirr. And then, wise in his negligence, he ringed my ears with openmouthed kisses.
Their master was soon beside us, a giant of a man in a shepherd’s cloak, a conical fur hat concealing his face, and wielding a staff at least ten feet tall. I prepared myself for the blow. Then the cloak parted like a theater curtain, revealing only a wiry boy’s boy very near my own age, standing upon stilts within the felt greatcloak and unremarkable save for his salient gray eyes, the left one half-closed.
The dog stepped off me to join his mate, who trotted up, a bit of parachute silk in his flues, his red beard full of cockleburrs. They seated themselves on either side of Iulus, barrel-chested, taciturn, with heart-shaped buttocks and slightly webbed feet. A handsome brace of superior spirits, radiating the same unpretentious dignity as their young master, even down to the half-closed eye; sly and unsentimental, neither obsequious nor shy.
Their coat, as their breeding, was like nothing I had ever seen in the animal world. A wiry texture, neither harsh nor loose, dark red bristles folded flat across a softer golden undercoat, changing its cast with every modulation of the moonlight. Their squared-off heads sported trim mustachios and goatees, brownish-pink lips and noses, and their immense ocher eyes were garnished with wispy eyebrows. When they shook their heads, the flapping of their ears sounded like distant machinegunfire, and it was only later that I noticed the detailed conchlike enfoldment of their inner ears, their only vulnerability, designed for the worship of natural sounds. And then, each with a single golden peeper trained on me, the dogs allowed their tongues to carelessly loll from the corner of their mouths, as if to say: “You see! One can be great; and amusing!”
We put away the chute and the shepherd’s disguise in a hollow tree, buried my shortwave and silver dollars, and walked through the night without a word. It seemed our contact could not have been otherwise; we were of that age that requires no password.
I was in a zone of pure existence, which I would not experience again until the tremors of old age. Part of me was still pasted in the sky, part of me ambled along the unsafe earth, illuminated by faint and mocking stars. And part of me was observing all this from an unknown vantage, calm and imperturbable. Yes, give me your hand.
In Cannonia the dawn is striped. Between great sliding plates of slate and amber in the nervous sky a pallid sun appeared, diffuse and shapeless as a ball of Christmas socks. What I had upon first impact thought to be a carpet of fir needles proved to be a unique ground cover, impervious to frost or scorching. Neither heath nor grass nor legume, but firm and pliant kidney-shaped leaves with stemless white flowers, each large enough to hold a dewdrop, each footfall releasing a strong and refreshing aroma. If one stumbled, there was not the slightest sound, as if we were traversing a great expanse of silent pride which could absorb the rudest insult. Indeed, as I often saw that morning, the ground was so forgiving that bombs often did not explode on impact, but merely buried themselves up to their tailfins, scattered about the landscape like giant clumps of gray-green crocus.
The dogs cast out from us in great looping figure-eights, apparently indifferent to game and involved solely in their role as escorts. Once an immense Icarian crane went up between them in an hysterical imitation of flight, but they paid no more attention to it than if it were a gnat. It was hard to say if their originality or their manners were more impressive.
In an effort at conversation I inquired about their origins. My contact glanced through me, smiled slightly, then gave a transparent shrug, indicating that this was not the time or place for such a long and problematic discourse, and implying that the dogs were only a kind of theme in a larger drama over which we had already lost control. So I changed the subject to the smell of the earth, a bruised tang something between pineapple and spruce, an aroma more incensed than any I had experienced.
“Ah, yes,” he spoke for the first time, wrinkling his nose. “Most of Europe smells of seaweed.”
“A seacoast can come in handy,” I bantered.
“Oceanus is a nullity,” he sniffed. “If a sea should be required,” he added more mysteriously than nicely, “it can always be brought onstage in the actor’s eyes.”
BEFORE THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
(Iulus)
I was born in Cannonia, province of Klavier, in 1924, the year that Lenin and Wilson died within ten days of each other. A member of the historical classes in the Central Empires, I came to life on my parents’ estate at Semper Vero, where tributaries of the living Mze and the dead Mze join arms in an artificial lake. The United States had not yet declared war upon us.
Today the Eyelet of Cannonia exists on few maps of Europe, the country often being covered by the mandatory compass sign or coat-of-arms. A country which is effectively all border, it remains almost perfectly unknown, the smallest and densest hermit kingdom on earth, an unprincipled non-principality, a puppet state without strings, a protectorate with no friends. Always part of the unredeemed lands, that uninscribed space where Teuton and Slav have offered each other the hemlock since the beginning of time, Cannonia has been occupied by all the major and most of the minor European and Asian powers since a lost column of Philip of Macedon stumbled upon its southernmost village, turning it into a bloody abattoir and renaming it Kynosarges after its only surviving inhabitant, a fleeing dog. Philip’s son, Alexander, would rue the day that he did not follow up on the only battle of the Eastern Empire fought in Europe, and was tortured into alcoholism by the suspicion that he had been raping the wrong continent all along. At Kynosarges he threw up a shrine to Dionysus and garlanded the ruins with ivy, which some ancients believed to be the entrance to Hades.
Our home, a cream-colored building in the shape of a thrown horseshoe, formerly a shooting box of the lesser nobility, was set on a plateau of red and silver heather and surrounded by an arboretum of rare evergreens. It had been in my family for one hundred years, during most of which it had been for sale. When my mother’s father inherited the property in the 1840s from a distant cousin, he ignored the architecture, eyes only for the land, which then held an undistinguished park. On trains, boats, and carts he brought in rare evergreens from all over the world, as if what they needed in this vast mountain periphery, filled then with virgin forest, was more trees. With its blue-black spruce, lime-green tsuga, feathery apricot of zelkova, and an occasional minaret of golden cypress, Semper Vero held the richest assortment of evergreens east of the Rhine. Grandfather also introduced animals from every corner—ostrich and rhino, auroch and ibex, llama and camel—many of which thrived, albeit in progressively miniaturized state, alongside the indigenous stag and hare. The park he then declared a game sanctuary, to which the people of Cannonia enjoyed unlimited access, except the King, who was enjoined from picking so much as a violet.
From my room in the centermost of three squat turrets I overlooked the kennels, set out upon an island in the artificial lake, and beyond that the town of Silbürsmerze, surrounded by trapezoidal fields stiff with hard, red wheat. We lived sumptuously