“If a sea should be required,” he added more mysteriously than nicely, “it can always be brought onstage in the actor’s eyes.”
BEFORE THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
(Iulus)
I was born in Cannonia, province of Klavier, in 1924, the year that Lenin and Wilson died within ten days of each other. A member of the historical classes in the Central Empires, I came to life on my parents’ estate at Semper Vero, where tributaries of the living Mze and the dead Mze join arms in an artificial lake. The United States had not yet declared war upon us.
Today the Eyelet of Cannonia exists on few maps of Europe, the country often being covered by the mandatory compass sign or coat-of-arms. A country which is effectively all border, it remains almost perfectly unknown, the smallest and densest hermit kingdom on earth, an unprincipled non-principality, a puppet state without strings, a protectorate with no friends. Always part of the unredeemed lands, that uninscribed space where Teuton and Slav have offered each other the hemlock since the beginning of time, Cannonia has been occupied by all the major and most of the minor European and Asian powers since a lost column of Philip of Macedon stumbled upon its southernmost village, turning it into a bloody abattoir and renaming it Kynosarges after its only surviving inhabitant, a fleeing dog. Philip’s son, Alexander, would rue the day that he did not follow up on the only battle of the Eastern Empire fought in Europe, and was tortured into alcoholism by the suspicion that he had been raping the wrong continent all along. At Kynosarges he threw up a shrine to Dionysus and garlanded the ruins with ivy, which some ancients believed to be the entrance to Hades.
Our home, a cream-colored building in the shape of a thrown horseshoe, formerly a shooting box of the lesser nobility, was set on a plateau of red and silver heather and surrounded by an arboretum of rare evergreens. It had been in my family for one hundred years, during most of which it had been for sale. When my mother’s father inherited the property in the 1840s from a distant cousin, he ignored the architecture, eyes only for the land, which then held an undistinguished park. On trains, boats, and carts he brought in rare evergreens from all over the world, as if what they needed in this vast mountain periphery, filled then with virgin forest, was more trees. With its blue-black spruce, lime-green tsuga, feathery apricot of zelkova, and an occasional minaret of golden cypress, Semper Vero held the richest assortment of evergreens east of the Rhine. Grandfather also introduced animals from every corner—ostrich and rhino, auroch and ibex, llama and camel—many of which thrived, albeit in progressively miniaturized state, alongside the indigenous stag and hare. The park he then declared a game sanctuary, to which the people of Cannonia enjoyed unlimited access, except the King, who was enjoined from picking so much as a violet.
From my room in the centermost of three squat turrets I overlooked the kennels, set out upon an island in the artificial lake, and beyond that the town of Silbürsmerze, surrounded by trapezoidal fields stiff with hard, red wheat. We lived sumptuously in the manner of the era, receiving all and sundry, feeding them to surfeit, giving away oats to each passing stranger, keeping musicians, buffoons, and singers, in addition to Catspaw, our resident artiste and intellectual gent, and of course our hounds.
My father was attorney and village notary. His family had come to Cannonia as part of the great Huguenot migration, carrying with them nothing but a bust of Erasmus. Arriving after the latest wars of liberation had reduced every town to dust, the only inhabitants being a few Greeks and Jews, they found themselves more powerful in fact than in the law, unable to claim primacy or privilege, but triumphing over the lesser aristocracy by better management, making do on lesser sums, before they themselves were replaced by Schwabian, then Jewish bailiffs.
Our life revolved around the kennels. My parents possessed a brace of animals called “Chetvorah” in the local dialect, dogs revered for centuries for their hunting ability. The yard of my childhood was littered with the limbs and stuffings of the training puppets Mother fashioned from patch quilts and sockheads, little limp punchinellos which the dogs carried about until they disintegrated. Father used a bamboo pole and fishline tied to a grouse feather to get them on point, while Mother accustomed them to the gun. She weaned each litter, taking them their pans of steaming chicken stew four times a day, and as soon as their noses were buried in the gruel, tails propellers, she would circle them while discharging a revolver behind her back. The bullets shattered the terrace wall, ricocheted among the limestone outbuildings, and scarred the ancient oaks. There were those who misinterpreted the lady of the house always with a pistol in her apron pocket, but it is inarguable that growing up is the incremental conquering of fear. Today, you could set off a cannon in my room and I would only nod.
I do not know when my parents abandoned their common bedroom and moved into separate suites in the towers at each end of the house, though it seemed to coincide roughly with my appearance. From their respective suites they could see each other through me in the central tower, and at night I could see Mother’s candles glow in the smiling Orient, while to the West, Father’s greenish lampglass shone, an omen of the electrified cities to come.
As for our recent troubles, the cause is clearer than usually imagined, for our grain market, which once fed all of Europe, had been flooded by cheap surpluses from America, dropping the price of wheat by half. The farmers of Klavierland, lacking cash, deferred Father’s bills until all his litigatory energy was spent on fruitless efforts to collect his own fees in the clogged civil courts. Bad debt became the driving force of our reverse renaissance, a spiral in which everyone borrowed more to pay the interest on the debts on which they had already defaulted, credit pyramided upon credit, and the only way to survive was to live in perpetual bad faith. As his business dried up, Father would look out at the rotting fields beyond our property muttering “American cereal,” an expletive arioso which came to explain every problem we encountered and still retains a certain resonance throughout the local cosmos. Soon came the layoffs, first of the part-time help, then of the marginal servants who could least afford it, the first-fired who would resurface as our masters a generation later. The gardens, never prim, grew even more ragged, leaving it hard to tell a flower from a vegetable or fruit. The grass in the uncut meadows ran wild, reaching even the armpits of those on horseback, and in which the herds of grazing aurochs were barely visible. The best woodlots were sold off, copses along the roads cut down to deprive thieves of hiding places, and the horses, of course, reduced. A generation of geese and ducks passed on, their organs confitured and packed away in cellars. Even the tanneries, now well-launched into the miracles of modern chemistry, stopped buying our dog shit for their dyes.
Indeed, the last cash export from Semper Vero was the leeches found in abundance in the swamps, for apothecaries still thrived upon the margins of the Central Empires. The peasants would gather them in barrels and leave them in a shed, then Mother and I with a gaggle of peasant children would sort and bathe each wretched creature twice. Grading them by weight, we sewed them into linen bags forty centimeters long, to be picked up and taken to market by hawkers, usually the Fleischman brothers of later distillery fame. But the inexorable advance of medical science finally reached even our part of the world, and as bleeding went out of fashion, and plethoric, overfed gentlemen took to the waters, the value of our leeches necessarily became less, and our last source of hard currency flowed away.
Save a milk cow, the cattle were butchered, and most of the fields reverted to scrub, causing a new chain of wildlife to establish itself with startling rapidity. Hawks clotted the afternoon sky. Foxes became bold as leopards. Storks stalked adders. Pigs charged horses. Cranes and eagles strutted everywhere, and fat, sleek owls sat like avenging buddhas in the crotches of conifers. Meanwhile, in my father’s breast a great happiness arose, even as his business continued to fail, for just as the French have the mystique of their fields and the Germans of their forest, my father’s religion was the edge, that manmade, regenerative tangle of stumps, burn-offs, inexplicable wetnesses, and covers, which the animal kingdom in its colonial period prefers above all things, and which provides the final illusion to townspeople who need to believe they are descended from great hunters and perspicacious gatherers. It was the happiness of watching
