In Partial Disgrace (25 page)

I also inquired, as instructed, as to the whereabouts of the Lost King.

“The King is hidden,” he snapped, “and shall remain so.”

Through the scent of milky feces, crusty gruel, and moldy paper, there was also the stench of fetid flesh wafting down from the sedge-green forest above us. He shot me a glance, and I knew it was useless to inquire further about our men behind the lines.

Sensing my discomfort, Iulus flipped the crown back on its peg like a horseshoe, leading me next door to the ruined cloister, which served as a barn, and where a cart filled with fresh straw, its tongues open, blocked the drive. He methodically harnessed the single horse left in the stable, a horse as calm and affectionate as a dog. It was not so much a horse as an enormous blocky blond pony, with Iron Age bones and a black dorsal stripe running down his back from forelock to tail. He was at least sixteen hands high, with a neck so strong it spoiled his shape, his hooves the size of dinner plates. Beneath the cart lay the parents of the litter, one dead, the other terribly aged. The mother had passed away that morning, her purple breasts exploding with mastitis, swollen white tongue clenched between her teeth. Next to her lay the sire, haunches twisted with arthritis, goatee and forepaws graying, his golden eyes clouded with cataracts.

Iulus moved deliberately but without distraction through the sad scene. He located some peasant Feastday costumery, though they were hardly actual peasant clothes, for they were beautifully made, never-worn attic costumes out of a comic opera, with velveteen capes, horn buttons, crocheted sleeves, and patent leather boots draped loose about the ankle, their only camouflage being the absurd distance they put us from the present grisly proceedings. They were, in fact, costumes from the pageant collection of the royal family, who during summer vacations near Semper Vero liked to dress as peasants and live “the simple life.” It was the only uniform Iulus could think of that would not compromise us with some faction in Cannonia, where seven different wars now raged. And I realized for the first time that he meant to accompany me out.

Iulus packed up the crown in a rucksack using great piles of manuscript for wadding. Then he deliberately filled a plaid valise with files, a Gladstone with correspondence, and a velvet ladies’ hat box with the plates of the Cannonian currency and the kennel studbook. He took particular care with a hand-tooled leather box with a raised monogram,
Z.
Then he picked up each of the nine pups under their front legs, and bussing them on the nose, buried them in the cart of straw. We mounted up on the narrow wooden seat, where I was happy to ride shotgun, and when he lay a gentle bootheel on the animal’s rump, the pony immediately broke into an electrifying
tolta
—faster than a walk, gentler than a trot.

As the cart creaked away, leaving the old sire exposed, like the great Old One, mauled by the young, who bleeding away sires a thousand sons. Picking up his ears and raising his still massive chest, he passed a curdling glance in our direction. His haunches quivered as if to follow us, but he soon thought better of it, and as the cart spewed gravel in its wake, turned his head away as if content with our receding echo. We set off into a pewter Cannonian mid-morning, green turds spinning out of the blond horse, and I felt the double melancholy of not only leaving a place to which I might never return, but of leaving a place that I was not sure existed. I turned for a final glance of Semper Vero. Across a bold curve of the Mze, a filmy veil of fog was rolling down the mountain spurs, and from the central turret of the manor, a single cloud pennon streamed. Then the translucent clouds deepened and darkened, and swiftly, almost instantaneously, at high noon, the light failed. In the dying afterglow, the country stretched into the nothingness beyond. Oh, how this soldier-boy wanted something different to belong to!

We rode in abrupt and arbitrary transition, just as in popular books, forded the shallow Its easily, and were gradually joined on either flank by solemn corteges of Astingi, winding across the blackened fields of no-man’s-land, to take shelter with us on the far side of the river. Their movement had none of the hallmarks of an advance or retreat. No weapons, insignias, or standards were on display. Legless veterans were carried on the shoulders of others. The men in their raspberry overcoats or menacing black felt cloaks, whips looped about their waists, rode in a mute assembly about the wagons of women and children, their great wheeled kettles and mobile hookahs in a fluid organization which required not a single verbal order. It was less an army than a biological force, simply crossing yet another river, another journey from nowhere to nowhere; for they had already forded the Mze twice upstream, in order to ford it again. The Astingi were laconic and expressionless, without so much as a backwards glance at their homelands. In their easy ancient resignation, they seemed neither warriors nor victims. Their very posture, their impressive silence, seemed only to indicate that entering history at its “cutting edge” was for them the most boring place to be.

Late in the day, beneath a flotilla of barrage balloons, we could make out the desultory massing of American supplies in the oxbow of the river. Brown Studebaker trucks scurried like she-bears as far as the eye could see. A PX was already going up, and next to the stockade with its California-style barracks for displaced persons, I could make out the outlines of a swimming pool and athletic fields. The Cannonian dusk would soon be filled with flyballs, as America mounted her exhilarating project to prove history wrong.

From the meadow bank, the Astingi peered from their ponies across the tawny river. On the far side, a group of sullen, drunken GIs stripped to the waist were skipping stones (a fact which seemed to startle even my impassive guide), and when a lanky left-hander skipped a pebble some twenty times across the whiskey-colored water, the Astingi vanguard scattered as if they had seen a ghost. Iulus stopped the cart and dismounted, studying the far bank in his binoculars. Then he turned his back and gestured to the lead horseman returning from the river, who seemed to recognize him despite the costumery. He galloped up and they had a brief discussion, speaking a language unlike any I had heard, lyrical but agglutinative, as if every word were a verb, a dactylic canter where each initial syllable set off a platoon of vowels which rushed away like birds after a gunshot, a basso continuo turning every A to O, every O to U, and every U to zero.

The Astingi leader regrouped his advance guard and followed Iulus down to the muddy embankment. My guide stared at the water for some time; then with a brisk but casual motion, he suddenly bent down and caught a trout in his bare hands. When he held it up, the huge half-naked adolescents on the far bank stopped laughing, just as the Astingi troop began. And then as Iulus turned round, putting the fish in a fold of his loose boot, the Astingi began to ford the river with renewed confidence, their faith in superior reflexes restored. They refused to use the bridge, their ponies negotiating the eddies so effortlessly one could not tell if they were actually walking or swimming.

We ourselves crossed the pontoon bridge lodged with the bloated carcasses of many horses and farm animals. I showed the bored MPs my papers, and they waved us into the camp, which we entered as if from another century, another planet, as if from some B-grade movie—two Kulaks in their Sunday best, a horsedrawn hayrick with its smuggled riches—the oldest trick in the book—and one, as it turned out, that was being replicated a thousand times a day along the stopline, each American policeman more credulous or indifferent than the last, as murderers, spies, and thugs by the score took shelter amongst the people who called Heaven their home. We were billeted at the rear of the camp which now stretched across two double oxbows of the Mze. The back office had finally caught up with our advance and was busily collecting information while denying rumors of a last great push to destroy the Soviets in their tracks, which naturally had elicited no great enthusiasm in the ranks. There was no longer any mention of Terra XX
.

A crowd of soldiers had already gathered about our cart, more curious about the single mechanical conveyance to survive their artillery barrage intact than our fey costumery, cautiously patting the prehistoric horse who gently nipped back, and cooing like a bunch of schoolgirls over the litter, which had now poked their heads from the straw, ears erect and rumps awhirr. Iulus decided then and there to break up the litter, for they were in that twelfth week of canine life in which the bonding to humans is best transferred.

There was no shortage of volunteers or tears. The new owners allowed their dogtags and serial numbers to be pressed into candlewax seals, and eagerly if laboriously wrote out their home addresses on the enormous violet pages of the leatherbound pedigree book. Then after looking them up and down, as if to match the
aristochiens
to the acned adolescents who whooped about him, Iulus insisted that they form in ranks while he presented the pups, while reading out their German call names: “Stekel! Federn! Kahane! Silberer! Honegger! Kremzir! Tausker! Schreber! Schrotter!” until he was sure that the new owners could at least half-pronounce them.

“To the victors go the spoils, as they say,” he concluded in suddenly perfect uninflected English, “but don’t forget, gentlemen, I will be watching you . . . forever.” The new owners were giggling, but they seemed to recognize his authority even though his outlandish garb was by this time literally falling to pieces. Then he dismissed them with cheerful wave of a hand, and our boys ran off inattentively, the pups frolicking at their heels, and I knew from that day on that my allegiances would grow ever more complicated. And frankly, I was just a bit ashamed of my disguise.

We stashed our gear and retired to our double decker bunks for some well-deserved shut-eye, snoring like grandfathers. I noticed he put the Z-box under his pillow. It was never out of his sight.

In the morning, I took the rucksack down to the company store, where they dutifully inventoried the crown and sent it off with a planeload of other Eurotrash to Fort Knox. They even gave me a receipt: “One Cannonian headpiece—gold alloy, jewels, etc. Condition: fair.”

And then we met with a pert stenographer and a Harvard social scientist with a great deal of hair in his nose and ears for such a young lieutenant.

“Are you Cannonian, or what?” he barked without looking up.

“Ah, I have recently been deprived of that famous charm,
meine durchschnittlaucht
” (“your averageness”), Iulus began diffidently, stripped down now to his 1920s tennis flannels. Upon repeated questioning, however, citing his noncombatant privileges, his refrain became something of a mantra. “I was born in Cannonia, province of Klavier, in 1924, the year that Lenin and Wilson died within ten days of each other. So I had a very happy childhood.” And then he pushed a strange, mottled birth certificate across the desk.

Iulus was certainly not into confessing, but neither was he enigmatic or evasive. It was as if with a double sincerity he was testifying that, while he recognized his powers of description were inadequate, he knew that what he knew for a fact would only be misinterpreted. Yet the conversation went on for an hour, with a series of questions that seemed to be a kind of market-testing to quantify at what price point our potential ally might be persuaded to subscribe to the New World Order. Was he a bad man or had he only done bad things? Has the war deepened your understanding of the world in which we live? In what ways has America fallen short of your expectations? Have your personal values changed in any way? The lieutenant fairly hummed the tune of our national false intimacy, which persistently encourages the performer of the moment to drop his dignity. Then came a series of questions that seemed to have to do with securing the pleasures of the ruined aristocracy for peanuts—the whereabouts of servants, winecellars, and lubricious women. “I really like history a lot,” the lieutenant averred, and on these subjects Iulus was more forthcoming, though still cautionary. “Ah, every hillock in Cannonia has a tale of buried treasure, but no one save the Astingi has ever found as much as a sovereign.”

Unaccustomed as he was to being counted among the Master Races, and having freight cars full of high-ranking Nazis to debrief, our Ivy League interlocutor finally declared his loss of interest. He knew where to find us if he needed us, he said. But as often happens in the debriefing business, the body language was more instructive than the conversation. If Iulus mocked the lieutenant’s earnest intensity, the lieutenant, not being a stupid person, also mimicked the shrugs he had noticed in this youth grown old before his time, a non-racial Jewish shrug, registering not secretiveness as much as non-conductivity, the gesture of a gentryman grown weary of his good manners. I realized I was witnessing a kind of bizarre contest; indifference bred versus indifference learned. Iulus, of course, as cursory witness, had the upper hand. But he never pressed his advantage.

Indeed, it was I who was uncomfortable in this interview. In Cannonia, national characters tend to be purified: the German most German, the Russian most Russian, and the American most quintessentially American. The Lieutenant radiated a curious compound of incuriosity and perplexity, the helplessness of abstract benevolence. Indeed, it seemed to me that right before my eyes, this proud fellow, this Newton of sociology, so clean and contracepted in his knowledge, was losing the boundary between right and wrong, as his general decency could only be expressed as aggressive and self-righteous sanctimony. He tried to cloak this with a self-conscious insouciance and boyish charm, as well as the apparently sincere belief that the scientific revolution stood at his right shoulder with the debonair nonchalance of a sergeant-at-arms. But Iulus acknowledged his interlocutor with the same amused equanimity of the Astingi watching another dogfaced people ford their shallow stream. He asked only if he could bunk with his Astingi comrades in the compound, and this was assented to with a final Cantabrigian shrug, as a form was pushed across a desk for him to sign off. Iulus chortled to himself as the pen was poised, as if he had forgotten which future alias was now appropriate.