style="font-size:15px;"> The Professor gazed at his family, glanced at the rope now coiled about his forearm, then looked my father up and down. “Twenty golden marks,” he said quietly.
Felix whistled slowly through his teeth. He gave Scharf ’s ear a gentle tug, for the first time reversing the flow of energy. The depressed saddle of the animal rose and his low-hocked rear legs straightened as he licked his hand. “Then it’s agreed?”
The Professor pulled his beard and replied he would have to think upon it. “It’s quite an exhausting journey, you know,” he added.
“Yes, of course,” Felix said. “But please understand, there can be no guarantees with this animal. It will take a long time and a bundle of money, and even then he will not be quite right. Don’t try to play games with him, because you’re going to lose and make yourself look bad. You can’t impress him. You can’t discourage him. You can’t embarrass him. None of the techniques you generally use with people are going to work with him. The best we can hope for is that he will live out his days with some semblance of social dignity. But first you must get your own family under control. The poor animal is getting mixed signals.”
They agreed to meet again, sans famille, in a month’s time, during which the Professor promised to stop hauling on the animal, and to have all the children practice sending out energy in compliant units along the rope in the manner proscribed, practicing first upon a bed post. They finally compromised on the fee arrangement—a full physical workup in Therapeia with the very latest techniques in diagnoze, in return for a month’s trial training—to which my father agreed more out of curiosity than anything, and the family returned by calèche to catch the last steamer, just before a stream of black thunderheads exploded over the Marchlands.
FATHERLAND
(Iulus)
My father, Felix Aufidius, was an exceptionally energetic and experienced fellow, athletic, gregarious, and priapic, an intense and watchful man with enormous inner territory, infinitely careless yet terribly focused. A hard-drinking old depucelator, an homme de femme who got better-looking as he aged, his angular features were increasingly apparent in the faces of peasant children throughout the county of Klavier. And may I say it was disconcerting to encounter your own little doppelgangers playing in the dusty streets of every village, as I became gradually aware that in effect I was the unwilling leader of a lost tribe. Felix was a big warm man with a smooth cold cheek, often with a heart-shaped lipstick smudge where his beard began. I wished to exceed him only as a tippler and a flirt, and would have happily donned his poisoned shirt.
Born into that century when humankind never worked harder, Felix was known locally as the only Protestant east of the Mze, the quickest gestalt to the west of it, and also as something of a Marxisant—at least to the extent that he agreed that the aim of man was to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner.” He was the only man I ever knew who roared with laughter when in the clutches of Das Grosse Kapital. “There are certain mistakes, which only an intellectual can make,” he often said. And if he could have chosen his epitaph, it would have read: “He had brains but not too many.”
In his den (and that word sums it up perfectly), a black velvet curtain bisected the oak-paneled tower suite, on each side of which he pinned quotes from his favorite authors, which he made me memorize, such as this one from the down-to-earth Red Prussian:
In place of the great historic movements arising from the conflict between the productive forces . . . in place of practical and violent action by the masses . . . in place of this vast, prolonged and complicated movement, Monsieur Proudhon supplies the evacuating motion of his own head.
I was in my fifties before I got the gist of that, near Felix’s own age when he clipped it. It was a reminder note that the most difficult intellectual work of all is like that of an unperplexed matador—to allow reality to step forward, then coolly sidestep it.
And I see now that the rote tutorial was apt, for our sensation of history is indeed nothing more than a great black velvet curtain onto which, along with a few sepia cupolas, haunting autoportraits, and vanished landscapes, a great number of pithy quotes have been flimsily pinned. Yet it is only against that opaque curtain of garbled out-of-context aphorisms that individual character can be truly developed, and those who refuse to stand before it never really emerge. Best to ponder it at midnight with some absinthe before a roaring fire.
My greatest joy was rifling through my father’s papers, from which I quickly ascertained that, as heir to Semper Vero, I could look forward to a veritable mountain of debt and virtually exponential taxes; and that my role in the world would be to default, if not gracefully, then with a kind of amusing aplomb, emerging from bankruptcy standing on one finger. Cannonia was the only country in the world where the ledgers were kept in real time, the only government that hadn’t learned to cook its books, and it was my generation from whom the debts of centuries would be called. Felix obviously knew this to be the case, and he also knew he could do nothing whatsoever to protect me, so he indulged my sullenness knowing it would run its course, as well as my acrobatic refusal of something as useless as an identity based on pride of ownership.
No, in spite of his agnosticism, his will contained the most terrible of Christian laws. The Father judges no one. He turns the judgment over to the Son. It is up to him not only to forgive, but pay the debt in full. I wasn’t up to either, and we both knew it.
One day I came across a copy of a letter from my father apologizing to a client . . . “for I must rush home, I so miss my infant son.” Think of that. That there might be something in me he might miss gave me a ridiculous sense of self-confidence, as well as a certain hauteur, and I pinned the purloined letter to the black velvet curtain, nailed it to the cross, between the expostulations of dead patriarchs.
Having mastered his profession early, my father, like most of his class, was unafraid to throw himself without limit into his hobbies, and he was more than content to play the amateur amongst his professional friends. A career could not be sustained any more than any passion, he believed, and so “real life” for him was a respectful if somewhat self-indulgent sideline, the only aim of which was to extract value. He was the sort of person who found irreverence and defiance irresistible, and as the possessor of what one could only call great moral charm, he was proud to take his place as a contrarian crank in a technological, profane, ego-based, and psychologically-oriented world, and mow his lawn on the principles of the Parthenon. Most anyone can orchestrate, but he could retranscribe, reduce a symphony to a quartet. In his heart he had both a sliver of ice and a sliver of gold.
My father’s idea of spirituality was to be in touch with matter and the way it moved, a hands-on mysticism which could have been lethal. For him, touch was the only performance of lasting duties. “If your hands and mouth are wise,” he told me when we first discussed the birds and bees, “virility will take care of itself. And you will seduce all the world, if you like.” He had three golden rules: 1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1500 florins, and a knife.
Semper Vero was crossed by the continental divide, marked by a mound made of earth brought in from sixty-three different countries in Grandfather Priam’s time, and not far from there, the Dead Mze broke up and darted underground, emerging again to die in peace one thousand miles away in some Russian marsh. This strange system was most visible at dawn, when the Cannonian countryside appears striped, the underground serpentine aquifers showing up as green squiggles in the sere pastures. In our part of the world, the Living Mze often changed directions, at the whim of its dead, diverted underground cousins, sometimes flowing East and sometimes West, a hydraulics as mysterious as those of the urinary tract, the only human system which remains unexplained by science.
