Читать книгу In Partial Disgrace - Charles Newman - Страница 13

A NEW CHALLENGE

(Iulus)

This was the first trip the Professor had ever taken without a book. After hustling aboard an express at the glass-and-steel South Station and crossing the Hron by the Invaliden Bridge, he sat stupefied before the window, watching rearward as the endless gasflares, smokestacks, and open-pit furnaces of the industrial suburbs drifted past. Referred to as “The Tannery,” this blasted stretch never failed to make a dour impression, furnishing an unlimited portico of scenes for rich, recurrent nightmares. That people could take the local and actually get off and go to work in this hellish scene was beyond him.

The Monstifita station was located off a spur which terminated in a ruined cloister serving as a train shed. Here the restaurant car was decoupled and attached to a Belgian steam engine with a squat body and disproportionately large chimney. Men with grimy fingernails crowded the zinc counter for beer and cigarettes as the train moved out along the suspension railway toward the spa town of Sare.

As the little train traipsed along its miles of timbered superstructure, it sent up a pale feather of smoke. In the yellow fog of morning, the peonies were dropping their last petals and the lime trees were in flower.

Upon alighting, the Professor and his dog were surrounded by Skopje, gigantic yet fleshy Russians in black caftans who believe that Christ never died but wanders the earth in different forms, and will come again when the great bell of Uspenskisobor sounds. They offered him his choice of gigs: fan-tailed or tub-bodied; a chariotee, rockaway, or volonte; a stanhope, tilbury, or cabriolet; a victoria, barouche, or laundolet. Also available were a sedan chair, a hammer box, and a lineika (a six-wheeled Russian equatorial carriage), as well as an American invention, a three-wheeled gig with the third wheel in front in close connection to the shafts. The Professor chose an older, half-closed brougham with lemon sateen side-panels, a piebald mare who stared at his beard as if it were a new sort of hay, and the shortest and calmest of the drivers, who at six and a half feet could barely contain himself. His sallow skull was shaven in front, with flapping plaits fastened by clasps to his forehead, and his caftan embroidered with scrolls and flowers.

“And where can I take your Excellency?” he inquired in a high-pitched voice.

“To the river landing, if you please. The cost?”

“Whatever you like, your Excellency,” the coachman said as he whipped the beautiful fat bottom of the mare.

Gypsies fiddled, lepers begged, and drunks beat up one another as the brougham sped along polished cobbles, dodging a plentiful fall of steaming horseapples clotted with peppermint. Like phantoms in a fairy tale, they proceeded at a bone-jarring trot through the villages of Nask, Luda, and Zaza. Along the road, rain had eroded the soil a dozen feet down, and the Professor could make out traces of former roads passing through the valley, one on top of the other, Turkish gravel overlaying medieval slag overlaying heavy Roman paving stones. Once through the three-gated military border with its bevy of moneychangers and louche soldiers, King Pevney’s Royal Way opened before them into that degenerate forest of well-levers which bordered the Marchlands, where for twenty leagues the land had not changed in thousands of years. This was a remnant of a pre-settlement expanse, like those undulating plains which once spread from Kenya to Mozambique and Wisconsin to Texas—oak-studded savannahs intertwined with clumps of forest, wetlands, blowholes, and tallgrass prairie, cleansed by naturally occurring fires, pumped clean by slithering aquifers and artesian wells, a shimmering green carpet studded with wildflowers that popped up any time of year, usually after a fire or some mysterious subterranean lucubration.

For the first few miles, the Professor drowsily watched the coachman’s huge back and the lobes of the horse. After a few hours, though, he began noticing portions of the road sticking to the brougham’s wheels, as Homeric clouds gathered above. The next thing he knew, the carriage was driving up the bed of a tributary.

“Captain!” the Professor called out.

“Sir.”

“Don’t you think we shall be drowned?”

“Yes, sir, I do! May I offer your Excellency a cigar?” Which the Professor accepted as the coachman, making a desperate effort, succeeded in climbing the right bank. But then after a short jaunt cross-country, he drove straightaway into a lake.

“Captain, have you a cigar left?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, give it to me quick.”

Jolting from ditch to quagmire, water to mud, and back to water, they finally arrived at the steamer landing.

On further inquiry about the fee, the coachman said only, “We won’t need a judge to settle it, your Excellency. Next time, you really should go to the opera.” And he seemed more than happy with ten gulden.

The steamer Desdemona had started her career with a rudder at each end and a small hut on deck, her huge paddlewheels driven by horses on a capstan inside the hull. When a British firm, Andrews and Richard, bought the ship, a coal stove took over for the horses, and the hut was replaced by an elegant mirrored saloon with red plush couchettes. A diving bell sat funereally upon the stern. The new captain, a weather-beaten English seafarer, knew no more about the sandbanks of the Mze than the bed of the Yellow Sea, and so at flood-time the ship was often found marooned in the middle of a field. The engineer was Scotch and would happily explain mechanical details of the operation, while the jolly Italian cook always kept a pot of bouillabaisse on the boiler.

It took three quarters of an hour to load the carriages, the stevedores cackling and the peasants crossing themselves. Then the ship’s whistle sounded, a small cannon boomed, and the Desdemona shuddered away from the slimy embankment, the paddlewheels churning up water lilies and duckweed as it bore new shortcuts into the rank abundance of the river’s huge loops. Countless waterfowl rose from the dead estuaries—cormorants and kingfishers, herons and egrets, warblers and martins—and from the dark walls of alder and poplar, hungry, chirping nestlings in a thousand nests craned their naked necks.

The river course seemed to have changed substantially in only a month. The passage was most dreary, winding among queer little villages well back from the treacherous banks and monstrous hills covered with hideous, half-pruned vineyards, while the river emitted a peculiar hissing like soda water. They saw neither sail nor oar, and it was difficult to even make out the direction of the current. But the cook enlivened things by making pancakes stuffed with pickled walnuts, and occasionally while rounding a bend, the Professor was taken aback by adorable women in lilac and lavender walking fully dressed into the river up to their armpits.

Inside the mirrored saloon of the Desdemona, the Professor recalled his first sight of Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar. Confirming his worst suspicions out here in the country, his host had come out holding a riding crop and wearing a tweed Chesterfield smoking jacket, twill jodhpurs, and a floppy fedora protruding a long pheasant feather. How well he knew the type. Here stood the very symbol of the moral pathology of the West, genteel, courteous, and above all handsome, a “Christian gentleman” and sportive hunter-magistrate—all a glittering illusion covering over the sickness of society, distracting the masses from reality. Had not Spengler himself identified the gentry as the most reactionary of classes? The Professor knew this privileged caste and its hypocritical code all too well. Oh, it all sounded sportsmanlike—“No hitting below the belt!” and “May the best man win!”—but every generous and graceful gesture obscured a base struggle for power. He imagined his host drinking himself into insensibility each night over a game of cards, then walking a seven-minute mile in the morning to sweat out the toxins, followed by a bit of tennis or high jumping (nothing that would make you appear a clown, of course), before heading out for an agricultural congress or a junket to fix an election.

But then from behind Felix had appeared, sheathed in shot silk, the most beautiful creature of any species the Professor had ever seen, walking at a slightly impossible angle, like a ballerina falling out of a fouetté. Here she was, the perfect trophy companion for our sportive hunter-magistrate! (Why is it always the man of orthodox views who gets to bed the girls by the cartful?) As Ainoha proffered a tray of spritzers and bogberry jam, the traditional Cannonian welcome, the look of her had sent a crackling over his heart which he had experienced only among Italian ruins at dusk.

“The Mze is a very bad neighbor,” the captain of the Desdemona grumbled to the Professor down in the saloon. There were landslides every minute. Boulders tumbled along fans of scree, and portions of forest collapsed before his eyes. They bumped along sunken bars of quartz, reconnoitered newly regurgitated islands, and dodged fallen logs, varying their course through new obstructions the river had created for itself. Bighorn sheep jumped from ledge to ledge on the creeper-plumed cliffs, and there now seemed miles of nothing save the antlers of dead boughs, crowned with mistletoe and hunched bald eagles. When they did reach a village, enormous white awnings had been cranked open, but only dogs were about, vicious as dingos, trotting down the shuttered lanes. The Professor nevertheless felt full of energy, for you only fully exist when you are in a lost province.

Then Ferryland, latifundia of the Astingi, opened up, a chocolate-colored expanse striped by barley and hay, scattered with poppies, horses swishing their tails, sheep up to their bellies in daisies, and everywhere the bangs of hunting guns. A few girls in the fields waved their sickles at the Professor, and by the time they reached the ruined piers at Dragon’s Teeth and the patiently waiting Moccus pulling a hooded lilac gig, all his ideas were again being hushed.

As the windless pillar of smoke above Semper Vero came into view, the Professor noticed some Astingi children in a clearing, charging about good-naturedly on their golden ponies, and playfully brandishing short, curved swords. They wore intricately braided jerkins (a doublet which it was said could deflect any arrow not entirely on the mark) and the Professor could make out some Astingi girls setting up melons atop fence posts, while one by one the boys thundered down the line at full cantor, leaning out of their stirrups and lopping the melons cleanly in half. The girls replenished the practice course with whole fruit as they feasted on the shards, spitting the seeds out in great arcs, as lesser men might lag pennies, and the boys waved gleefully to the stranger as they abruptly reined up their mounts. It was a silent and dignified affair, marred by not so much as a war whoop or girlish squeal. Even the hoof beats were barely audible in the soft Cannonian earth.

At length, however, one rider struck out toward the gig, waving his saber menacingly, and the Professor broke into a nauseating sweat, realizing that in all this vastness there was not a single place to hide. But some fifty meters away the boy sheathed his weapon, leaned out from the horse, and with his head dangling near its hooves, plucked a sapling straight out of the ground. Then, swinging upward in triumph, he grinned, revealing a golden triangle in his front teeth. At this moment the Professor felt he had wasted his entire life.

The Astingi were neither an ethnic group nor a nation, neither a religion nor a movement. The only barbarian tribe to keep its name and language intact, even their race was difficult to tell, as they were usually covered with a grime of coal smoke, and their reddish-blond hair turned black in old age. They had no monuments, no ruins, no book, and they spoke a language unknown to their neighbors—indeed, to whom they were intelligible, besides animals, is not quite clear. A popular academic surmise held they were the remnants of a species of Homo erectus that had elsewhere died out without evolving into us. But they were not the proto-us. They were superior to us.

Geographically, they neither founded nor wandered, but in summertime occupied the high plateau of Crisulan, where the tallest plant to be found is the wild onion. In winter they returned to their black tents on the outskirts of town, sending their brown children out to beg by feigning blindness, retardation, leprosy, and other crippling injuries. Often they brought their performing dogs to Silbürsmerze: one danced with cymbals hanging from its hips, another sang along with his master’s falsetto war cries. Some charged and withdrew upon wordless commands; one dropped pebbles in a vessel so as to bring the water level to his lips, then begged for an ice cream cone. Another presumed, after looking you up and down and sniffing your hand, to snuff out a dittany from one hundred herbs for what ailed you.

In Roman times, whenever a barbarian tribe revolted—whether the Roxolani, the Jazyges, the Suebi, the Parthians, or the Basternae—their actions were blamed on the Astingi roiling behind them, though truth be told, the Astingi preferred to watch from their unassailable plateau as various predacious hordes rode operatically back and forth, creating the stage sets of Europe. These settlers were often confused as to whether they were invaders or refugees, finding the interior more densely crowded than the conditions they had left behind. Meanwhile, to the front and rear, the Imperium harassed them continually, apparently just out of spite, as social convulsions flooded them with psychopaths, criminals, bitter intellectuals, and masses of people so genetically and culturally broken that they could neither give nor take, but only expire slowly in their midst.

For the Romans themselves, the Astingi territory marked the northeastern frontier of the empire, which may have been why Marcus Aurelius, a frequent visitor to Cannonia during the interminable campaigns against the barbarians, chose to retire there and finish his meditations inside a fortress looking out at the ephemeral riverbanks of the Mze. Dying, he watched one day as a raft loaded with Astingi foundered in the river, its helpless soldiers swept off among ice floes. Not one of them, nor their officers on shore, shouted or bemoaned their fate. They did not even gesticulate while wordlessly awaiting death in the icy water. For the first time the Prince could not arise at dawn, and denouncing himself in his day book, turned over on his couch. Looking as he was through the rose window of the West, when the old gods were dying but Christ had not yet appeared, the warrior-prince-against-his-will had come to believe that if the soul were virtuous, one might look out to eternity, and there would be nothing new for future generations to witness, for the world is both good beyond improvement and evil beyond remedy.

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, training,” he whispered, trilling the ns.

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.

“Kominzeeheer, 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.”

“Why do you suppose they love us so? And why do we even bother with them?”

Father stopped, and as they turned to look over the fields, delivered himself of something like a courtroom summation:

“This attachment to man is not born of consciousness, nor does it become conscious. Man, through the insensitivity of objects, feels homesick and alone. In his depths there is an earnest cry for intercourse. When he looks at things, they do not appear different; when he utters his cry there is no response. His conversation with nature has been silenced. The dog is the only one who remains, his reminder of the world of nature that has vanished. Snatched from our place in nature, all love seeks that which is lost, all that which is not itself. In the shimmering heat in the silent fields, we hear in the cry of the animal a call for companionship. The stronger the man, the more vulnerable he is to this. Then the dog finally comes, and together they search for unreal shelter.”

The two men stood with their arms about each other’s shoulders, discussing the mysteries of coordination and conduct, staring out into the unkempt fields in which huge hares bounced like kangaroos and quail called cloyingly to one another as raptors wheeled in the thickening sky. Wolf shoved his head in the tall grass, while leaving his body well outside the green envelope. A gadfly was playing about his limp tail.

“So,” the Professor mused, “we are back to the Jurassic. Horsetails high as oats, saurians running about.”

“Ah yes, my friend,” Father said proudly. “Out here in Klavierland we are truly, absolutely . . . nowhere!”

They agreed that as unpromising as Wolf was, he deserved an indefinite trial, provided the Professor would visit regularly and participate in the great experiment.

“So,” the Professor sighed, “Wolf is a real survivor.”

“Sentimentality will shorten your life, my friend,” Father said softly. “One must be on guard with survivors. They will damage you.”