There was no shortage of volunteers or tears. The new owners allowed their dogtags and serial numbers to be pressed into candlewax seals, and eagerly if laboriously wrote out their home addresses on the enormous violet pages of the leatherbound pedigree book. Then after looking them up and down, as if to match the aristochiens to the acned adolescents who whooped about him, Iulus insisted that they form in ranks while he presented the pups, while reading out their German call names: “Stekel! Federn! Kahane! Silberer! Honegger! Kremzir! Tausker! Schreber! Schrotter!” until he was sure that the new owners could at least half-pronounce them.
“To the victors go the spoils, as they say,” he concluded in suddenly perfect uninflected English, “but don’t forget, gentlemen, I will be watching you. . forever.” The new owners were giggling, but they seemed to recognize his authority even though his outlandish garb was by this time literally falling to pieces. Then he dismissed them with cheerful wave of a hand, and our boys ran off inattentively, the pups frolicking at their heels, and I knew from that day on that my allegiances would grow ever more complicated. And frankly, I was just a bit ashamed of my disguise.
We stashed our gear and retired to our double decker bunks for some well-deserved shut-eye, snoring like grandfathers. I noticed he put the Z-box under his pillow. It was never out of his sight.
In the morning, I took the rucksack down to the company store, where they dutifully inventoried the crown and sent it off with a planeload of other Eurotrash to Fort Knox. They even gave me a receipt: “One Cannonian headpiece — gold alloy, jewels, etc. Condition: fair.”
And then we met with a pert stenographer and a Harvard social scientist with a great deal of hair in his nose and ears for such a young lieutenant.
“Are you Cannonian, or what?” he barked without looking up.
“Ah, I have recently been deprived of that famous charm, meine durchschnittlaucht” (“your averageness”), Iulus began diffidently, stripped down now to his 1920s tennis flannels. Upon repeated questioning, however, citing his noncombatant privileges, his refrain became something of a mantra. “I was born in Cannonia, province of Klavier, in 1924, the year that Lenin and Wilson died within ten days of each other. So I had a very happy childhood.” And then he pushed a strange, mottled birth certificate across the desk.
Iulus was certainly not into confessing, but neither was he enigmatic or evasive. It was as if with a double sincerity he was testifying that, while he recognized his powers of description were inadequate, he knew that what he knew for a fact would only be misinterpreted. Yet the conversation went on for an hour, with a series of questions that seemed to be a kind of market-testing to quantify at what price point our potential ally might be persuaded to subscribe to the New World Order. Was he a bad man or had he only done bad things? Has the war deepened your understanding of the world in which we live? In what ways has America fallen short of your expectations? Have your personal values changed in any way? The lieutenant fairly hummed the tune of our national false intimacy, which persistently encourages the performer of the moment to drop his dignity. Then came a series of questions that seemed to have to do with securing the pleasures of the ruined aristocracy for peanuts — the whereabouts of servants, winecellars, and lubricious women. “I really like history a lot,” the lieutenant averred, and on these subjects Iulus was more forthcoming, though still cautionary. “Ah, every hillock in Cannonia has a tale of buried treasure, but no one save the Astingi has ever found as much as a sovereign.”
Unaccustomed as he was to being counted among the Master Races, and having freight cars full of high-ranking Nazis to debrief, our Ivy League interlocutor finally declared his loss of interest. He knew where to find us if he needed us, he said. But as often happens in the debriefing business, the body language was more instructive than the conversation. If Iulus mocked the lieutenant’s earnest intensity, the lieutenant, not being a stupid person, also mimicked the shrugs he had noticed in this youth grown old before his time, a non-racial Jewish shrug, registering not secretiveness as much as non-conductivity, the gesture of a gentryman grown weary of his good manners. I realized I was witnessing a kind of bizarre contest; indifference bred versus indifference learned. Iulus, of course, as cursory witness, had the upper hand. But he never pressed his advantage.
Indeed, it was I who was uncomfortable in this interview. In Cannonia, national characters tend to be purified: the German most German, the Russian most Russian, and the American most quintessentially American. The Lieutenant radiated a curious compound of incuriosity and perplexity, the helplessness of abstract benevolence. Indeed, it seemed to me that right before my eyes, this proud fellow, this Newton of sociology, so clean and contracepted in his knowledge, was losing the boundary between right and wrong, as his general decency could only be expressed as aggressive and self-righteous sanctimony. He tried to cloak this with a self-conscious insouciance and boyish charm, as well as the apparently sincere belief that the scientific revolution stood at his right shoulder with the debonair nonchalance of a sergeant-at-arms. But Iulus acknowledged his interlocutor with the same amused equanimity of the Astingi watching another dogfaced people ford their shallow stream. He asked only if he could bunk with his Astingi comrades in the compound, and this was assented to with a final Cantabrigian shrug, as a form was pushed across a desk for him to sign off. Iulus chortled to himself as the pen was poised, as if he had forgotten which future alias was now appropriate.
“You don’t even know what your real name is, do you?” the lieutenant barked with exasperation, and to this Iulus managed a perfectly defenseless, docile, democratic, American shrug, equal parts dissent and submission, as feckless as those he had witnessed among the boys when handing out the pups. He was surely a quick study. Then he took the fine fish out of his boot and laid it on the table.
We led the golden pony down to the compound at dusk, where I had a devil of a time explaining to Iulus the sign at the gate: “No horseplay.” A great normalcy seemed to pervade everything. The barbed wire was strung loose. Kites flew. No one was peering out. No one looked in. The Astingi women were allowed in groups under guard to go down and do their washing in the river. The American sentries, wearing only sidearms, aimlessly wandered the perimeter, as if they were on their way to school.
The Astingi had already knocked out the windows and disassembled the prefab barracks, covering the doors with colorful capes and shawls, festooning the gray walls with great loops of sausages and braids of garlic. Cooking fires had been lit. Lambs were slaughtered and spitted, kettles burbled, piglets were gutted and baked. Melons, eggplant, leeks; red, green, and yellow peppers appeared from nowhere. The Astingi men in long skirts and their women in pantaloons passed long clay pipes between them. Their children, almost naked, played with tiny puzzles or read large thick books on their backs while a seven-dog orchestra woofed their woodwinds. As Shakespeare cultists as well as woman cultists, the Astingi were already throwing up stage wings for an open-air performance.
As a disorderly mass of starlings buried the sun, blackheaded whimpering gulls by the thousands descended on the bluish mists of the Mze. Skylarks rose with a whir, herons gazed coquettishly toward the vanished sun, and imperturbable rooks stalked off to the woods for the night. Then the reed-beds erupted in a fortissimo of song-duels, an ambuscade of lovelorn yearning, a clangor of male wailing and wanting which silenced the chorus of victory and the manly arts of war.
Iulus hobbled the blond pony loosely with a thong of crimson patent leather. The pony yawned, and as the bones in his face cracked, Iulus softly intoned an Astingi chant for me. “‘He who hath not seen the bird-pastures of the Mze / hath nothing seen / the whole world drinks from our river / the eyes of the sea. And whomsoever drinks from her / bottomless mists longs to return.’ You see,” he concluded with closed eyes, “it’s impossible to talk even for half an hour without the Mze coming into the conversation. .” We embraced shyly and made plans for an early breakfast in the commissary. The war was over.