At the very center of this hygienic and anatomically correct abattoir was a blue and white enameled metallic box, the size of a small treasure chest, glowing with a strange out-of-place sanctity, and surrounded by a few landmines with the earth still fresh upon them. Stenciled on the top was the logo “LIBERTY PURE LARD (Roberts & Oake, Chicago, USA).” It had been dropped from an American airplane, killing a shepherd, and they had not been able to identify a single item in it. Inside, along with condensed milk, concentrated orange juice, Cheerios, Mars bars, baked beans, Spam, and soya curds, were several five-pound packages of margarine in plastic globes, a bullet-sized nodule of coloring embedded at each center.
As I was about to explain the meaning of this gift, Iulus wrestled a hindquarter down from the nose of a particularly proud elk, cut a large chunk from the gelatinous pink mass, and pinning the meat to the table with a knife nearly as large as a sabre, detached the heart of the loin. Then he took a smaller knife from his boot and began to mince the loin with a flurry of strokes. Soon there was a pile of maroon shavings, and he wrapped these in old yellowed newspapers which announced the Russian victory at Kursk, an international congress on physiology in Leningrad held in spite of the siege, and the lead piece, a dog show in Silbürsmerze, noting that the number of entrants was the lowest since the flu epidemic of 1919.
We put the meat and select items from Chicago in a rucksack, clicked our heels together, put our voices well back in the larynx, shot up our forearms, and with a merciless ironic giggle (which I then believed to be an entirely new form of humor) goose-stepped out of the Meat Museum and reentered the square, which now seemed darker and more claustrophobic than the cellar. Crossing to an elliptical corner, a dark lane at once opened up, and as we left the square it transformed itself back into a trapezoid.
The houses leaned in upon us, insisting, as with everything else in the country, upon their own manner of collapsing. I was losing both my concentration and curiosity, crushed by the thought of the numberless exhibits I had not yet seen. But my guide had an exquisite sense of these matters, and a clap on the shoulder indicated that our general orientation was about to be concluded. We had indeed come upon a rather astonishing detached house in a relatively new suburban quarter. As was common with Cannonian bourgeois townhomes of the inter-war period, the small front yard was adorned with busts of the resident family — Mother, Father, and two daughters in this case. The sculptor had given each of them the same expression of tranquil pride with a trace of sarcasm.
The house was of three stories — gray limestone, green majolica tile, and terracotta successively — topped off with a copper mansard roof in which were set two rows of false arches. All this was surmounted by a domed cupola with an open window, from which at this very moment, chin out, tail elevated, and legs tucked expertly beneath him, a red dog leapt into space. A geyser of water erupted from the courtyard as the animal plunged some sixty feet into a raised pool. As we drew nearer, I was aware only of the circular pool, exploding every few moments with another spume, flashes of red fur hurtling across a plum sky, a curved double staircase leading up to flung-open French doors fluttering with torn lace drapes. The first dog who leapt had by now paddled up to the fluted edge of the pool, his bushy muzzle plastered slick as an otter’s, the nails of his forepaws glistening as he hauled himself from the water. He shook himself into a convulsion which began in his jaws and ended with a crack of his tail as an aureole of mist rainbowed about him. As he sat shaking, I was aware of another shape cannonading into the pool behind him, another dashing across the drive spewing gravel in all directions, another taking the staircase in three powerful bounds, the front and rear paws crossing one another at the peak of the gallop, another disappearing through the French doors, another ascending the interior spiral staircase without breaking stride, and yet another bursting from the cupola without a moment’s hesitation, launched into the darkening air in the noblest of freefall frozen poses, until he too galooped into a geyser of white foam.
I was witnessing the circular blur of a pack, a volley of arrows. Wetted down in elongated suspended flight, each dog preceded and followed his psychopomp in a never-ending chain of pure play. It was as if we were at the World’s Fair booth of some unknown mad little country, where you were not sure if you were watching a film, puppets, wound-up dolls, or perfectly trained animals, or whether this was a ritual entertainment, some veiled protest at an ancient insult, an induced lunacy, or a scientific experiment in which the exact protocol had been forgotten. It was the sort of arresting image one was to encounter often in the conundrum of Cannonia, but when I asked my guide what on earth was going on, he replied wittily but without irony, with one half-closed eye, “Many dogs taking a bath downtown?”
That’s what I came to love about Cannonia; it may be too much but it never gets too long.
On the bootscraper back at Semper Vero, dried pomegranate colored mud fell away from our feet like broken waxen molds. Then, as the color ebbed from the sky, we experienced the “wolf-light.” The rocks flared ochre, apricot, and magnesium blue, as a great solemnity pervaded everything. We dined by candlelight on elk carpaccio, blood sausage, hot banana pepper, and coffee dropped in from America. Then Iulus produced a bottle of 1806 Napoleonic cognac. “The Ton-Tin,” he murmured softly, “the bottle which survivors of the regiment drink to those who have fallen. I suppose we are they.” We toasted the past, present, and future, we toasted our parents, our children to be, our friends, each other. We toasted Great Britain, we toasted Russia, we toasted any country we could think of. We drank in memory of countless invasions, oppressions, diasporas, droughts, earthquakes, and sufferings, and we drank to America, the only country, as Iulus reminded me, whose national anthem begins with a question.
Then I produced the packet of LIBERTY margarine I had carried with me from the Meat Museum, with its bullet of carrot coloring at the center. Iulus stared at the deathwhite glob with undisguised disdain. I broke the nodule and the fluorescent amber dye spread throughout the plastic globe, its ugly streaks very much like the rays of a burst sun which figured so often in the crests of the Central Empires. It became striped as the dawn in Cannonia, though harsher and stranger. I kneaded this little distended synthetic world, pushing here, pulling there, until it gradually reassumed its ovoidal shape, colorized into a new alloy, piss yellow and old gold. I haven’t the faintest idea why I did this.
A frieze around our empty dining room announced all the secret societies of the masculine and feminine temperaments, which did not clash as much as they fitfully and fantastically informed upon one another. Against a molding of the purest white and gold, blue Wedgewood medallions of young ladies in classical white dresses shot bows and arrows, played blind man’s bluff, or cavorted with boars and dolphins. The chairs were lyre-backed Chippendale, the tea service bronze, the oval table black pearwood. And interspersed among these refined objects were mahogany and walnut cabinets stuffed with rifles, maps, documents, busts of emperors, heavy decanters, half-open annotated books, tobacco jars from every country, stoneware, earthenware, and striped agateware. The walls held a great number of recumbent odalisques, all smoking, each more seductive than the last, painted in a rather crude but very up-to-date art nouveau style, though pride of place was given a tall portrait of a great beauty in a soldier’s uniform with an eye patch (his sainted mother, it turned out), whose cyclopean golden gaze presided over all. There was also an enormous sooty rectangle over the piano testifying to a huge but recently removed canvas, no doubt a spoil of war, as well as a portrait of Grandfather Priam, who needed no introduction, given his half-closed eye and distant gaze to the East.