The two armies manning the borders had similar uniforms; only the colors of the epaulets and the weave of their braid differed, and both had a defeated look — puzzled faces and broad, unreferenced gestures, many of them maimed and on crutches, sitting around waiting to be demobbed or disembarked to another front. Occasionally they would form up and fan out in a long column, two abreast, simulating a withdrawal or reconnaissance around an empty field. And semi-occasionally a file of these hangdog men in full battle gear, packs sagging at the small of their backs, rifles slung butt-up over a rounded shoulder, would appear like phantoms out of the fog, but they would never look you in the eye, much less threaten. Another day you might find them all on one knee, service caps crumpled in one fist, at Mass. But their most common and dignified maneuver, it appeared, was squatting on their field latrines, half a dozen at a time, those waiting in line knocking pipes out on their rifle butts, bayonets stuck in the ground, staring out over an embankment or a half-filled trench, writing letters on each other’s backs.
On anniversaries of major battles the two adversaries would have a soccer match among the wells, or a boxing competition on a tarpaulin stretched from stump to stump in a patch of woods. But more often than not they would simply lounge around the benches by the gatehouse, holding hands sometimes, lagging the coins of the realm, which depreciated before they even hit the ground. Theoretically, they were locked in primordial and eternal combat, but in fact both were armies in full desultory retreat from politics, ideology, and nationalism, from the cant of every discipline, comical but serene.
Any time I felt, as one increasingly did in those years, that the impersonal forces of history were grabbing hold as the hum of the social machinery started to miss, every time I felt such an anxiety, I would ride out to watch those aimless soldiers guarding the unmarked foggy border, pants crumpled around their boots as they eternally sat on their latrines, and be touched by the moments of tender feelings of men lost in the last outpost — soldiers who in the end had become skeptical of every plan and were protected by nothing but the commonplace delicacy of their own displaced credulity, pondering how to refuse the abstract mission which had befallen them without being traitors. And while I come from a long line of noncombatants, never put a stick to my shoulder as a child, never learned with my tongue how to make the sound of a gun, I loved those crumpled, fragile, degarraloused soldiers as much as a man could love another human being. Parades never did a thing for me, and serried ranks assembled brings up in my gorge only the great graph of Napoleon’s four hundred thousand setting out from the Marchlands to Russia, and returning in the cold with less than ten thousand men, marching without fear and hope.
Those guard-stations at the gates were more full of life than any art I ever saw, more beautiful than ballerinas. Common soldiers no longer brave, no longer lads, not prideful yet gay, covered with scabs and lice, pay in arrears, their only amusement half-decks of cards and half-finished letters, soldiers who, silently and collectively, provided the greatest moral example by simply refusing to be killed.
The green steeples of Sare had come into view. We trotted though the empty cobbled streets in the moonlight, and I left my charge at the train station, also deserted save for the little green locomotive, which was being washed.
If any of this made any impression on the Professor, he did not say. It was two in the morning when I entered the lime-tree avenue of Semper Vero, the horses trotting on their own accord. Everything on that transparent day had given me pleasure. A thunderstorm was coming up, and as the first rainbursts crackled down, the horses’ withers glittered like a dung beetle’s back. Once in the stable, they swiped at the fragrant hay, then playfully brushed each other’s faces, batting their silken lashes and pawing at the stable floor. Saddle and bridle removed, they exhaled and flung themselves onto a small haystack. Kicking out all four legs and running like dogs in their sleep, they petulantly destroyed the fodder racks, knowing that this night’s grooming would be up to them, groaning in their stalls.
As I entered the hallway I could hear someone playing scales, as was often the case in our house, any time of day or night, but these were exercises of stunning rapidity and monotony. From the top stair I could make out Gubik’s back working robotically on the Bösendorfer, preparing for his audition no doubt. But then I noticed a fat book with scarlet bindings open on the music stand, which he was reading while playing, repeating the scales over and over, as if he were only pretending to practice.
TOPSY AND THE PRINCESS (Iulus)
An enormous black-lacquered Panhard-Levassor limousine, whose exaggerated aerodynamics, as with so many French designs (which ape the birdlike only to end up reptilian), was the first automobile ever to arrive at Semper Vero, its bonnet still throbbing even when the engine was turned off. I was astonished to see Öscar Ögur at his footman’s post, only moderately drunk, and for the first time in memory in full uniform: gray-green jacket with horn buttons, gray riding breeches with scarlet revers, and knee-high polished boots. The car was quickly surrounded by a few shaggy fieldhands and slender, wistful goosegirls. Mother, attuned only to the echoes of quadrupeds, had for once not anticipated this arrival; indeed, she was still abed as I ran to rouse Father from his lair. Only when he emerged, gruff and disoriented, did Öscar open the car door, and there Felix recognized the still beautiful if melancholy face of Princess Zanäia, dressed in a simple muslin dress with a single string of pearls and rubies. And behind her, the stolid chocolate gaze and arch benevolence of the Professor.
That very night the Voo returned, or rather his dog did, a final inane augury demanding divination. Azure flecked his mottled back, dappled golden light set his scales ablaze, and in his heads, left and right, his jaws were clamped about the whitest of femurs, while in his middle muzzle, his lips were pursed ovulate, as if around a vowel. He stood there a long time, straining as if to defecate, offering me the bribe of sleep. But omens no longer impressed me, for what good is foretelling if you cannot prevent the disasters you foresee?
“It must be a quarter of a century since I’ve visited your. . parc,” the Princess announced wistfully. “A wonderful place to discover that childhood is not all asexual, non? Hélas!” She turned slightly to the Professor, holding a hand to her breast. “I cannot keep my eyes fixed on any single face or feeling. The immobility of the eyes is forbidden to those who survive.” And then she moved serenely, save for her darting glances at each footfall, up the staircase to greet Ainoha, who had just emerged in a hooded capuchin robe to mask her disheveled hair and sleep-filled eyes.
In the car Felix could make out a dog with its face squashed horribly against the windscreen. The rear compartment of the Panhard, with its needlepointed empire jump seats, held a number of crystal decanters, several small portraits, an herbarium full of fern specimens, and great wads of manuscript.
“And we’ve brought you some sardines,” the Professor winked, as if this were a gift to the fishiest tapestry on earth.
Father’s first reflex was to move toward the injured animal trapped in the limousine, but sensing his concern, the dog bounced at once through the rolled-down window, exhibiting that it was not maimed at all, but merely an extremely brachiocephalic specimen of a golden chow, its undershot jaw smashed back in its skull like old green potatoes.
“Now what petit toxemia have you brought me?” Father chuckled beneath his breath.