him, if you say so much as ‘go out and play,’ that he will kill himself!”
“Extortion by defenselessness?” the Professor queried.
“You are on the right track. You see, he doesn’t want to get any better, because that might mean losing what little he has.” And he looked down with pity at the bland criminal groveling upside down in his drive.
“The dog does virtually nothing,” Felix went on, “yet you say he does not mind. There is, if you will permit me, a contradiction here.”
The Professor was rapidly warming to the role of the interrogated. “Well, yes, go on, then.”
“Does the animal in question prefer any of you?”
The Professor seemed at a loss.
“Your daughter, perhaps?”
The Professor reflected at length, then, folding his arms: “He prefers my daughter’s . . . bed.”
Felix stared kindly at him. “The animal in question does not love you,” he said softly, “and this is an affront.”
The Professor nodded. “There is no dignity . . .”
“He doesn’t give a fig for dignity!” Felix interrupted. “What is worse, if I may say so, is not so much that he is ill, but that the illness bores you!”
The Professor was fidgeting, shifting from foot to foot. “It is true,” he muttered, “that in this animal there is not a great deal to admire.”
“So the problem, really, is whether this ‘joke,’ as you put it, will become even more tragical. Or perhaps more interestingly, how much tragedy a joke can stand.”
“You put it well, although I fear we have left poor Scharf behind in the richness of the diagnosis.”
“That should be the clue that there was not much there to begin with.”
“No one is suggesting that he promised more.”
“Scharf is an open book, Herr Professor. He is neither a rebel nor a saint. He is not even suffering in the strict sense, or rather, he suffers from a vagueness of personality, a deficit of character. Upon this you can project nothing, and so nothing comes back. Like the lumpenproletariat, you wonder why he does not rebel against his circumstances, and when you are not wondering about that, you are wondering why he does not thank you for your charitable impulse to keep him alive.”
“This may all be true,” the Professor stiffened, “but hoping for a small progress is a human frailty, which you apparently ridicule. Perhaps we ought to take our leave.”
Felix commenced a shrug, but then apparently thought better of it, and put his arm warmly around his client’s rigid shoulders.
“Do not fear my candor, sir. My friends are well-known and legion, for only the most decent people can put up with me. Let us, you and I, have a confession couleur, a conversation galante.”
Then, before the Professor could object, Felix told him straightaway that Scharf was a hopeless case that only the most intensive treatment and objective stimulation would make an even remotely palatable companion, and that a cure, in any accepted sense of the word, was impossible.
This seemed to intrigue his client as much as it appalled him. But Felix, always conscious of giving value for money, nevertheless tried to put the animal through some paces. He grasped the rope like a lunge line on a recalcitrant pony, and with a flick of his wrists sent long ripples along the rope, which thudded like soft Papuan waves into Scharf ’s vagus nerve. Rather than pulling on the animal, he was sending energy out. It was a trick he had learned from working with horses, and while it worked much less well with dogs, who as a species were more skeptical of excess freedom, he knew nothing better for the moment. It was all in the wrists, 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
