Читать книгу In Partial Disgrace - Charles Newman - Страница 14

IN DARKEST CANNONIA

(Rufus)

The Agent known as Iulus had the grave dignity and easy familiarity of the Cannonian gentry, taciturn and intent, without a hint of either fear or braggadocio. This was not, as I would come to recognize, the dignity of the freeborn, but of those who have witnessed the ineptitude and transitoriness of all great powers, and despite an inferior environment, have refused to be robbed of value. His wiry frame, although delicate, was extremely purposeful, cradling the infuriating hand-eye coordination of the natural athlete. If you threw a comradely arm about him you were instantly aware of a tremendous tensile strength for his slight size, a deadly serious will with a lightness of touch. He was the essence of the Schwermut, with that indolent charm which combines the alertness of the northern sailor with the impassive expression of the Byzantine, a youth who was used to talking on equal terms with both adults and animals. At twenty-one he gave the impression of having tried everything and renounced everything. He had no complaints and no hopes. But there wasn’t a touch of bitterness or self-doubt in his manner, and it was easy to see why women would go crazy over him.

The relations between himself and the dogs were formal and respectful, not those of master and pupil, much less man and beast. It was an older notion of conduct—that in order to preserve the integrity of the relationship, a true friend never feels the necessity to declare one’s love. It seemed both man and animal were in touch with a discipline beyond them, which announced that friendship might turn into love, but never the other way about. I knew I was already out of my depth, and that was just fine with me.

We proceeded through successive islets of forest, each interval exposing us longer in the dawning light, until finally our cover disappeared entirely as we traversed a corridor of open stubble fields. On their thickened edges, scythed exactly as high as a man’s thigh, I could make out other canine shapes, moon-colored dogs isolated in small packs, loping along as if attached to us by invisible wires, a kind of flanking cortege.

Then suddenly the flat and uninteresting country opened up into a vast amphitheater of hills, rising like immense solidified waves, increasing in size as they receded to merge into a great blank wall of naked granite peaks on the eastern horizon. The dirty gray glacial scour of the finest pumice fell sharply to the turgid river. On the far side Iulus pointed to a manor house, hunched like a yellow cat taking the sun out of harm’s way. “The Cannonian paradise,” he announced softly, and it was then I first beheld Semper Vero.

I was attached (under the cover of Divisional Historian) to the counter-intelligence unit of the 20th Armored Corps, XII Division, 65th Infantry, U.S. 3rd Army, Operation Hercules, which had been stopped (or rather, politically halted) in April of 1945, on the west bank of the Hron, where you could smell Cannonia, as you can smell an island in the sea. We could have easily pressed on into Cannonia Inferiore and taken the heights along the Mze, but the men were hardly willing to risk all in the last days of the war, and in any event, even if Roosevelt’s sudden death had not paralyzed the command, the textbook terrain was unsuited to armor. No one had ever been able to maneuver militarily in those vast, rich, flat, and foggy marchlands, for the most part undrained, unchanneled, and uncharted.

Admittedly, we had been through a rough patch of days, the deliberate sigh of the 70 mm artillery, the blustering howl of the Nebelwerfers, the thin whisper of mortars, and the evil singing of the 88s. But once “Roosenheimer’s Butchers” (as they referred to us on the German radio) broke through and routed the last of those Nazi champion diggers, we found ourselves alone alongside the turgid, steely Hron, and relaxed.

Cannonia was the closest, cruelest country for a fighting man, a veritable manmade jungle, a combination of ingenious irrigation, assiduous ancient cultivation, islets of virgin forest, and other trophy features of constructed wild topography. Calculatingly preserved from ancient times as royal hunting, smuggling, and pleasure grounds, it made even saturation bombing problematic. Every vineyard stake was topped with a bayonet against parachutists, every pathway had a false bottom. Every cemetery cross was sharpened, and even the chimps at the zoo were said to be armed. One could apparently march all the way to Russia beneath a deep canopy of trees, camouflaged in the never-ending sound of rushing brooks. The strategic possibilities of its underground rivers and saltmines appeared to be endless, its villages were dispersed and pocketed as if by a master strategist, and the “countryside” was simply a euphemism for vineyards and fields of white asparagus bordered with impenetrable hedgerows, in turn separated by marshes and canals. The whole territory was slathered by the serpentine tributaries and lesser streams of the Mze, Its, and Vah. The only possible military movement through the country was either by deep canal or narrow winding roads lined with lopped-off oaks, grapevines thick as a man’s arm and a hundred times more resilient, not to mention thickets of mulberry and false gorse. Every copse provided a perfect ambush, every thickwalled granary a line of fire, every capacious courtyard a potential boobytrap. Tanks might pass within thirty yards of one another and never be the wiser. When it was hilly there was not so much as a crag or cave to give cover, while the spectral flatness of its oft-bloodied plains elicited hallucinations. In short, the country’s strangely cultivated wildness blotted out any normal apprehension.

Cannonia was the only place in the European theater that had not yet seen action, an island of calm, a mote of silence in which dog shows were still regularly scheduled beneath aerial dog fights, and indeed, under the pressure of invasion, the populace had become, from all evidence, even more lighthearted, carefree, and erotically active than ever. During our bombing runs they repaired excitedly to their cinemas and cafes in the saltmines, cheerfully attesting to the Roman observation that “the best part of Cannonia is underground,” as well as their local slogan, “to be well hidden is to live well.” We were always somewhat taken aback at how well fed the Cannonian civilians seemed to be. During a lull in the advance on Dede-Agach, we were taken by damsels in white dresses and parasols to a chocolate factory where the sugar ran higher than my boottops.

I had left the crystal decanters and chandeliers of OSS (Oh So Secret) London so hastily that no one had backgrounded me on Cannonia. Our man behind the lines had brought the good news out for nothing, I was to take the bad news back at salary, the only distinction between enlisted man and officer, as far as I could see. My mission was straightforward: walk the cat back to Dog Cannonia, make contact with Iulus, and pick up the Holy Crown, the symbol of the nation’s legitimacy, before the Russians could snatch it.

One of my old college chums, Ed Kirby, then as now a reliable courier, rode with me to the aerodrome. He seemed uncharacteristically nervous, stroking his not prominent chin and crossing and recrossing his unmilitary wingtipped brogues. But he had my orders directly from the Potomac. In essence they were this: the Hron was our stopline. Make no commitments of any sort. We should assist any retreating Germans (Marshall Zhukov was quite right to complain about this) and should we encounter any Russians, be prepared to exchange small presents, and avoid wearing your good pistol or expensive watch.

Ed had brought with him the Cannonian file. There was nothing in it but a yellowed Herald Tribune clipping about some unpaid World War One reparations, railway schedules from the 1930s, a letter from the Rockefeller Foundation refusing a grant to rebuild a Cannonian cathedral, as their guidelines precluded funding a pagan institution, as well as portions of the diary of a seventeen-year-old daughter of an Austrian diplomat who had taken a pony cart tour at the turn of the century. “The wind blows differently here,” she began.

Ed’s own knowledge of Cannonia seemed to be restricted entirely to memories of Comp Lit at Princeton. “The Cannonians believe that every life, like every book, has three beginnings and three endings, but there’s no choosing between them. One must accept them all. That’s the Cannonian twist, their Triplex Philosophia. There’s always a twist in Cannonia,” he said somewhat sarcastically. “Stand fast and wait to be contacted.”

Those were Ed’s grinning last words as he saw me aboard the blacked out DC-3, handing me a copy of American Plans for a New Cannonia —a tome, to tell you the truth, I have never finished to this day. Suffice it to say that as the Cannonians had perfected bourgeois life to its ne plus ultra (a source of particular fascination to the Soviets) their history was one of continual collaboration with any government which had the temerity to announce itself, and their insatiable pursuit of private pleasures made them the most unreliable allies imaginable. We had not taken their foolish and comic declaration of war upon us seriously, and while they might well be “damned inconvenient,” as Sumner Wells put it, our interests there were not material, and our policy was one of “limited encouragement.” Nevertheless, as a kind of farewell present to the Soviets, whose appallingly mauled remnants were now making their appearance amongst us, it was thought that we might contact and offer support to a potential guerrilla force, a semi-nomadic tribe known as the Astingi, allegedly the last tribe of prehistory to keep their name and language intact. Free of all modern malaises, the Astingi would fight at the drop of a hat. “To be vanquished and not surrender—that is victory” was their slogan. Their brief, “to prick every woman in the world as well as every Empire.” They had fought with Napoleon in 1805 and against him in 1809, fought with Lafayette in 1775 and with the British in 1812, and were even said to have intervened in our Civil War, somewhere in Florida. They had no heroes, no myths, no lost nation, and no promised land. They neither founded nor wandered. They had come from nowhere and disappeared into nothing, long-nosed, subtly smiling, and sensitive-footed, moving only at night, leaving no traces above the ground, mystifying the barbarians with their imperturbable discipline and appalling the Romans with their permissiveness (the husbands actually sitting down to dinner with their wives).

They were by now the most rugged race left on the planet, jolted on horseback from the day they were born, occupying the great crystal clear high Plateau of Crisulan at the source of the Hor, an area by turns parched as the Sahara, barren as the Gobi, and cold as the Arctic, where the tallest plant to be found is the wild onion, and more impractical to the explorer than either of the poles. They believed in neither God nor the Devil, nor in the sacraments any more than the resurrection of the dead. Christians, Pagans, and Musselman alike had termed Cannonia the “country of the unbelievers.” Yet the Astingi apparently always had everything they needed. “Even their dog leashes were made of sausages,” as Herodotus noted. They thought the Cossacks wimps, the gypsies too sedentary, the Jews passive-aggressive, the gentry unmannered, the peasants too rich by half, the aristocracy too democratic, and the Bolsheviks and Nazis too pluralistic. When cornered, they would put their women and children in the front ranks, and fire machine guns through their wives’ petticoats. And in times of peace they were renowned for their impromptu traveling performances of Shakespeare and Chekhov. The only belief they shared with Americans was that the entire world was constituted of rings of peoples set up to protect them.

Their women, nimble, handsome, and accommodating, were celebrated for their extraordinary carriage and complexions varying between pink and bronze. The infidelity of wives was punished by a mild beating, while that of men by a fine of cattle. The men were famous for their outspokenness, friendliness, and nonstop humor. They seemed to be everything I admired—handsome, intelligent, and reckless, with a healthy relation to life and oblivious to death.

To be honest, I didn’t see we had much to offer them. Indeed, I had noticed in London that our intelligence briefings had become more complex and arcane as our forces approached the border. I took little interest in the internecine struggles our specialists described, backing one bandit one day then changing their allegiances the next. It was clear only that Cannonian politics were as gnarled, fecund, and impenetrable as their landscape, as useless to themselves as to others, and that a military mind could not even begin to plot their intricacy. So it was not surprising that our analyst’s lectures petered away self-consciously as glazed stares from the ranks became the norm.

But arriving at the front, I heard quite a different story. Among the guys, Cannonia was simply referred to as Terra XX, where it was rumored there was a secret redoubt at the exact geographical center of the continent, filled with art masterpieces, one hundred tons of gold, and heavy water, guarded by a battalion of yellow-eyed dogs and seven-foot mountain men in scarlet tunics—a cache in its scope and preciousness which made Cannonia at that time the most cultured nation on earth, as they had been regarded in the fourteenth century when their treasury and library exceeded that of France. We had been told to stand fast, coil up our formations, and clean up our flanks, but you could sense the renewed “fighting spirit” among the ranks.

This was not a novel notion. We knew that Hitler (“That handsome boy who never rode a horse,” as Iulus’s father called him) was constructing a vast redoubt in the Bavarian mountains from which to conduct a last stand, as well as house his art collection. As in the First World War, the only strategic reason for our bloody forcedmarch upon Cannonia was to cut off a potential German retreat. Our information was based on intercepts of cables from the Cannonian foreign minister, Count Zich, to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Oshima, offering shelter in Cannonia for the imperial family portraits, consistent with the traditional Cannonian foreign policy of keeping a foot in every camp, and further suggesting that the location of the true inner redoubt was in salt mines in the Unnamed Mountains of Cannonia, which already housed Hitler’s own Vermeer, The Artist in his Studio