Once relieved, I chanced to glance up, and on the far bank I could make out a band of silent mounted men, an Astingi advance guard which I recognized by their raspberry overcoats and high fur hats, something you don’t often see in April. They were gazing down at us paternalistically, as they had for three thousand years, witnessing the besmirched Matron of Christendom as she once again walked into their shallow stream to perish. After buttoning up their overcoats and letting off a single rifle shot, they held up an odd three-fingered salute and filed silently away behind a dome of rocks.
So it was that we came to parade rest on Cannonia’s watery border, about to read her secretmost entrails, prepared to open a spacious wound in Hell’s own soil, dig out ribs of gold, and build a Pandemonium. We had no experience with that long tradition in which the cheerful and well-intentioned tyrant, with his perverse magnanimity and wooden hug, enters the ghostly empire to pick up the beautiful corpse, only to have it fall apart in his hands. Indeed, we believed, even more than the communists, that we had captured a stage of history — the worst thing, according to Astingi lore, that can befall a people.
That night, all along the Mze, our artillery massed hub to hub, we lay down a coordinated fire the likes of which even the most battle-hardened veteran had never seen. The Conqueror was smiling in his chariot, and his horses smiled the same hard smile. You could read the dark book of history as if it were daylight; the barrage threw all the objective ground to be taken into bold and summary relief. We had been ordered to explode all four corners of Cannonia. But she never really caught, only smoldered. A stench of blasted muck hung over the country for years after the war as the louring Commander reined in his foaming steeds.
We had hardly bivouacked when an old soldier came stumbling out of the forest in a uniform cobbled together from five or six nations, and began to spill the beans in several different languages before we even put him on the ground. His first words were a warning not to shell the barges down river, as they were loaded with poison gas. Then he added proudly that this was the exact spot he had surrendered in the First World War. “I can’t read or write,” he muttered, “but I can sing.” My rule then as now was to never interrogate a prisoner under forty, for you can learn little from a man who still thinks he has something to prove.
I can’t say that we completely understood him, our proficiency in languages being of a strictly schoolboy nature, and it became increasingly clear that Öscar Özgur was something of an idiot, though quite calm and professional about it.
But Öscar had in his possession a letter written on violet stationery in rather grandiloquent French, addressed to no one in particular, sealed with the waxen emblem of a petite noblesse terrienne, as well as the last attestatory secret code of our man behind the lines. There was also a latitude and longitude for a proposed rendezvous, and the promise of a bonfire burning. The family crest portrayed a nymph trying on a crown (the infamous Venus of Muranyi, I was to learn) astride an inscription: “Back to the original sources.” It concluded rather formally, with my contact’s swirling vermillion signature dusted with cinnabar.
. . Venez, si vous voulez, et recevez notre couronne.
Nous causons souvant des delices de notre
maison viste don’t le souvenir me s’effacera
jamais de nos coeurs mille et mille amities.
Sauve Que Peut, Iulus
Naturally, the letter stunned me. Even the most dedicated student of Cannonian affairs could not have anticipated such a windfall. I admit I had the stench of priceless treasures and czar’s gold in my nostrils. My putative superiors were still well to the rear, and there was little point in torturing such a pathetic messenger with further cross-examination. Things were loose at the front in those days, my OSS papers invited no questioning from even the most belligerent rednecked MP, and the letter seemed to fulfill the spirit of my vague orders. I may have lacked Zeus’s stamina and colorful disguises, but I had his roving eye. I wanted to do things with Cannonia, some gently, some not so, some with long graceful movements, some with short automatic bursts. And then of course, I wanted to pick up her broken body and be cheered in the streets. These were not the naïve sentiments of a wild-eyed boy. That was always to be the fatal misapprehension of our adversaries. For we were born harsh, beyond the Gulf Stream. We only looked soft and shiny — like a larva, concealing a stinger enfolded in its heavy blond wings — a vast armada of Detroit steel and Texas oil, beneath a comic sheen. I was looking for no vista, I can tell you, no place to meditate, no real estate. When you grow up looking at nothing but billboards and telephone poles, and your only relation to the past is Euclidian geometry, you don’t mind looking, properly armed, straight into the jaws of hell. And in Cannonia, where the sky meets the ground like no place else on earth, at dusk everything is the color of a runaway dog.
To tell you the truth, I never felt either courageous or foolhardy. I had spent most of the war pretending I wasn’t baffled. I never heard from anyone a patriotic sentiment. We were simply fatalistic. And we felt so much more akin to the Germans and the Russians that we could hardly believe we were fighting with the English and the French. I mean let’s be honest about it. Was anything ever more fun than picking up the Europids — those peoples who have made an artform of feeling sorry for themselves — in their unparalled wickedness, and bringing them sternly to account? You can get away with murder in America, but only in Europe can you be really bad. My specialty and my nearsightedness had so far protected me from the more suicidal missions in which our men behind the lines had been my proxy. I had a burning desire to do good. And to kill somebody.
Orders in my pocket and invitation in hand, I was nevertheless overcome by an anxiety I had never felt in battle, a horror vaccui, in which even a tear for our sacrifices would not flow. I have never felt such unease or uncomprehending fear as I did that late afternoon on the Mze. Old hands call it Fingerspitzengefuhl (fingertiptingling), and it is more addictive than sex. But what good is foretelling if you cannot forestall the disasters you foresee?
I commandeered a jeep, and on a makeshift runway in a sugarbeet field, after presenting my doctored Joint-Chief-of-Staff ’s laissez passer, talked a bored flyboy into taking me up. I don’t know what kind of plane it was, only that the takeoff seemed longer than the flight.
The manor house of Semper Vero squatted phlegmatically upon the flattened top of an eroded volcanic cone. From the base of the old volcano, blackened vineyards and chocolate-colored fields fell away on all sides, interspersed with patches of mustard flared with poppies. Each irregular field was partitioned with musk rose and yellow gorse, and every inch was cultivated to the very edge of a serpentine road which ended abruptly at the base of steep forested slopes. As Iulus poled me across the Mze, in a strange copper-prowed caique, I again consulted my maps, and realized that this rim of heavy dark primeval forest was the same wall of oak and beech that Marcus Aurelius had rightly feared as the home of the barbarian, and yet it was here, in the only forward outpost in which he felt truly safe, that he laid down his pen and died. The river at this crossing point seemed to be encased with sheets of steel.