“Much too correct, nicht blutwallungen, brutalmente. . Now, there we go, that’s better. . There. . Allegro maestoso. . No, no — fast but not all that fast. There, easy, but not too easy. Adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio!”
The Professor’s Trabuko had fallen from his mouth, leaving a trail of embers and ash down his sweat-stained shirtfront. His gaze was locked on a grove of trees on the far side of the river, and Felix himself was taken aback when he saw the winding file of naked girls, their hair undone, jars on their shoulders, bells on their anklets, garlanded with coins, gold chains, and shards of glass. The Peraperduga had been set in motion, one hundred paranymphs dancing in the wilderness in search of purling streams as yet unknown, praying for rain in three languages on the back road to Silbürsmerze, and shivering for joy. A dry muddy-colored rainbow arched over their wild hymns like a faded provincial opera set.
“What can it mean?” the Professor whispered hoarsely, and Felix intoned sadly:
“For us, it is only the definitive sign of drought. Or worse.”
The sun had been cut off quite suddenly by the bluff, as the ladies were startled by a horrific sucking sound.
“Strangely enough,” Mother observed evenly, “the river is often ugliest at dusk.”
The sucking continued and the Princess gazed out nervously at the Mze, which was busily regurgitating a new island: an ovoid slab of primordial mud flecked with quartz.
“Receiving semen is my greatest ecstasy,” pronounced the Princess apropos of nothing.
They returned to the house in a nude monotonous march.
At the peak of floodtime there is absolute silence, as every discord has been harmonized. But now with its strange resorbent sound, the river seemed to be looking to acquire a language at the very moment it had lost its power of metaphor. It was as if the Mze had lost its primal force, had tired of making limpid aesthetic statements and become self-conscious, yearning to be expressed. Its gurgle was rather like actors in a play whose lines are so densely poetic you cannot grasp them or the action; just the opposite of Father reading to me, that tumultuous cataract, those enfilades of dirty soldiers marching through the night. If this were a language its waterfall was now played out, its once curved body flat and meager, the pother as its base, vanished. The surface rapids were no longer visible, curving backward in sulfurous currents. There was no osmosis, no flowing — just a series of little scum-covered puddles, half-suffocated with water lilies and spiked rushes, into which ivory scavenger gulls, no longer able to plunge for fish, gingerly stepped, dreary, sad, and invested with an air of desperate deprivation. Poorly equipped, they carried away mysterious and far-from-appetizing fragments of this language, which in no time at all reappeared on the newly exposed rocks as a squirming white cape of excrement.
As an unwanted encore, Waterlily had launched into a conclusion of Astingi frontier songs, snatches from the decasyllabic “Ballads of Heroes” (Kange Krajiŝnice) of which every Astingi girl had a repertoire of hundreds — short song-cycles formulated in the fifteenth century to conquer the boredom of the men’s endless recited epics. I had always thought their artistic value slight, but as she refashioned them in voix mixte, her uvula flickering, ad lib with variations as the player pleases, she emptied the landscape of everything save the text, and Semper Vero consisted of only the solitary singer and her page.
Once in the East
A host marched in helmets
A man was with them on horseback
With two dogs.
I pulled him down from his horse
Where he fell I stood up
I put on his clothes, whistled his dogs
Blew into my cupped hands
As the helmets drifted dead in the stream
The ladies were playing desultory tennis in men’s whites when the Topsy party returned, a brace of Chetvorah chasing down and retrieving any ball which left the court. The straw target was stuffed black with arrows.
The Professor was red-faced but proud, and Father walked behind, pale but also proud. The Princess waved her racquet, and the Professor, showing off, dropped into a half crouch as Topsy heeled.
“Nervorum atque cerebri mala affecto (don’t get creative on me),” Father hissed in camp Latin.
The Chetvorah sat on either side of the net like referees, waiting for a mishit and pointedly ignoring Topsy. The Professor thought they were slyly winking at him.
“And how did my little darling do?” the Princess queried breathlessly, one eye on her pet and another on a ball rolling slowly off the court.
“She takes it all very well,” the Professor beamed. “Not bad at all,” Father informed the party, “considering her rational part is defectuous and impeached.” Then he went to kiss Mother, whose hair was still wet. “How goeth it?” he whispered in her ear.
“Oh, we do not enjoy seeing one another, but would be unhappy if we didn’t,” Ainoha mused. “She’s not in love with her husband, and what’s worse, not in love with anyone else.” She had on that fake brave grin which always affected Felix more than her natural smile.
“If I were religious, I would pray for one thing, dear heart,” she whispered as Father took her in his arms, “and that is, we ought to leave. . the retail business.”
“My thoughts exactly.” He held her close. “The best pet is a pet idea.”
They walked back to the Professor and Princess, who were also talking earnestly and intimately. Topsy was calm, golden flecks in her hazel eyes.
“The time has come for the ultimate reinforcement,” Felix gastriloquized, and after taking the cord from the Professor’s pocket, he ambled out on the lawn away from the court. “You see, training finally becomes four-dimensional, not by aspiring beyond the material, but by humblingly, gruelingly, and systematically working every fine point into the body until it becomes second nature.”
First he gently pulled on a fold of Topsy’s neck, then released the cord nonchalantly, keeping the flat of his hand on the place the cord had occupied. Turning to his audience, he rasped, “It’s the last mile, of course, which is the hardest to hold.” Topsy blinked coquettishly.
“Care, take care,” Father whispered as he drew away from her with a slow backward tango-tread, tracing out a pause in which his partner could play in and adorn. Then he raised his right arm perpendicularly and gently pressed his left hand against her back.
“Toho,” he whispered, and the dog slowly turned her head, eye on his hand, tail flagging, but mute. “Bend,” he orated softly, “bend,” and Topsy slowly arched her back, raised her head, and lifting a forepaw ever so slightly, she turned and twirled.
“Utter transcendence,” the Princess swooned.
“A million-dollar move,” the Professor ejaculated.
“That will do,” Father whispered to Topsy. Then, balancing on one boot, exhaling as the breath was drawn out of the dog as well as the assembly, gradually spreading his hands as if he were pulling apart dough, all movement was suspended. The air itself seemed to disappear, sucked away, and the earth pulled all heads downwards. Then Felix slowly pivoted on one leg, and scarcely giving the sign of a downbeat, he concluded the muted elegy as all the players resumed breathing.
“All we want in this world, all we want,” Father whispered hoarsely, “is that the damn dog follow our lead, that she walk calmly by our side with her head high.” A tear came to his eye. “But. . this is all too rare. Not one in a thousand dogs is worth keeping.”