Death in Venice and Other Stories (35 page)

At this point the other dog silently rises, as though never having intended to play the tiger, and stands exactly as Baushan does. Sheepish, miserable and deeply embarrassed, they both stand there, unable to pass. Both would probably like to do just that: they turn their heads, then steal sidelong glances at each other, and a mutual feeling of guilt seems to hang over them. They shove and sidle up to one another, nervous and grimly alert, flank on flank, to sniff each other's procreative privates. At this juncture they often start snarling, and I call out to Baushan in a low voice and admonish him, for this is the moment of truth that decides whether a fight is to erupt or whether I will be spared that trauma. There's no telling how and even less why it comes to a fight. All of a sudden, they're nothing but a ball, a raging turmoil, from which bestial growls and tearing noises issue. I have no choice but to intervene with my walking stick to prevent serious injury, trying at the same time to get my hands on either Baushan's collar or the scruff of the neck and lift him in the air, often with the other animal dangling by its jaws or enacting various other horrors that keep my teeth on edge for the better part of our walk. It can also happen that little or nothing comes of all the theatrics, but even then it's difficult to make an inch of progress. Even when they don't try to take a bite out of each other, the two animals are altogether too united by some unyielding internal bond. They may seem to have gotten past one another. They may be standing in a straight line instead of flank to flank, facing in opposite directions instead of staring each other down, scarcely turning
their heads, only glancing back as far as their eyes alone allow. Nonetheless, despite their spatial separation, the unhappily stubborn bond refuses to break. Neither can tell whether the moment of freedom is truly at hand. Both would like to leave, but because of some obscure qualm of conscience, neither dares stir from the spot. Then, at long last, the spell is broken, the bond dissolves and Baushan goes hopping away, liberated, his heart unburdened, as though life itself had been restored to him.

I bring this up to illustrate how utterly foreign and strange to me such an intimate friend can become in certain circumstances. At such times his very nature is baffling and obscure. I shake my head every time and can only guess at what underlies this side of him. Otherwise, I know him through and through and have a sympathetic understanding of his mannerisms, his facial expressions and his physical behavior in general. I know only too well, for instance, that special squeaking yawn of his whenever one of our excursions has been too short to scare up any prey. I may have gotten off to a late start that morning so that I have only fifteen minutes to take some air, before being required to turn back. Disappointed, Baushan trots beside me and yawns. It is an unabashed, impolite, jaw-unhinging, bestial yawn accompanied by a guttural squeak and an insultingly bored expression. “A fine master I have,” this yawn seems to say. “Here I picked him up from the bridge late last night and waited outside today while he sat behind his glass door, until I practically died of boredom, and when he does finally decide to go out, it's only to turn around again before I've caught a single scent. Woe is me. A fine master! A fraud, this master! A pathetic excuse for a master!”

His yawn expresses all this with an ill-mannered frankness impossible to misinterpret. And I have to grant that he has a point, that I owe him something, so I stretch my hand down to pat his head or shoulder in consolation. However, under these circumstances, he shows no gratitude and refuses to accept my endearments. He just yawns again—if possible, more rudely—
and wriggles out from under my hand, even though unlike Percy, and in keeping with his commoner's sensitivity to physical pain and pleasure, he normally likes to be patted. (Above all, he loves having his throat rubbed and has developed a comically frantic technique of jerking his head so that one's hand is directed to the proper spot.) Disappointment is not the only reason for his temporary disinterest in my overtures. It also has to do with the fact that whenever he's in motion—that is to say, whenever I'm in motion—he feels no need to be patted. He finds himself in too masculine a state for physical endearments—a situation that changes as soon as we come to a stop. Once we do, he is again receptive to my affections and will requite them with clumsily fervent insistence.

Sometimes when I'm reading a book in the corner of my yard or under my favorite tree, I'm quite happy to interrupt my intellectual pursuits in order to talk or play some game with Baushan. What do I say, when I talk? Mostly I just call out his name, that sound which above all others is of particular interest to him because it designates himself, and which consequently has an electrifying effect on his whole being. By repeating the word with various intonations, I can rouse and ignite his ego, reminding him and making him ponder the fact that “Baushan” is what he's called and who he is. If I keep this up for a while, I can put him in a state of rapture, a kind of ego-intoxication, in which he will spin round his own bodily axis and, chest bursting with pride, bark loudly and jubilantly up toward the heavens. Otherwise we entertain ourselves with a game in which I tap him on the snout, and he responds by snapping at my hand as if it were a fly. This makes us both laugh—yes, Baushan, too, laughs, and to me in my laughter, the spectacle of his mirth is one of the strangest, most moving sights in the world. It touches my heart to see the corners of his mouth, his typically haggard animal cheeks, start to quake and quiver when I tease him, to see in his blackish animal face the physical manifestations of human laughter—or at least their pale, somewhat hapless, melancholy
reflection. I watch them appear, then disappear, giving way to startled embarrassment, before returning once more to tug at his face . . .

Let me break off here before I lose myself any further in details. Despite my best intentions, this short description is already threatening to take on a distressing scope. I only want to sketch my hero in his full splendor, in his element, in that part of life in which he's most himself and his talents appear in their best light, namely, at hunt. Prior to this, however, I must acquaint my readership with the arena of these delights, our hunting ground, my stretch of land by the river, for this location is intimately bound up with Baushan's person and is as dear, as familiar and as significant to me as he is. So, without any further literary justification, the reader will allow me to introduce the hunting ground as the official heading and subject matter of my next portrait.

T
HE
H
UNTING
G
ROUND

In every backyard of our spaciously planned development, there is a sharp contrast between older, giant trees that loom over the rooftops and frailer, artificially planted young ones. Easily recognizable as the original vegetative inhabitants of the region, the former are the pride and joy of our still quite recent settlement, and extreme care has been taken to protect and preserve them wherever possible. If in the process of measuring and dividing the lots a conflict arose—that is, if some venerable trunk covered with silvery moss happened to fall on a demarcation line—a fence was made to bulge out slightly, thereby incorporating it into someone's yard, or a considerate gap was left in a concrete wall, where the old fellow still stands tall, half private, half public, its branches sometimes bare and snow-laden, sometimes adorned with tiny late-blossoming leaves.

They are all specimens of the aspen, a tree that thrives on dampness as few do—which tells you something definitive about the unusual character of this stretch of
land. It wasn't long ago, no more than a decade and a half, that human ingenuity first reclaimed this area for habitation. Before that, it was only wild swampland, a real mosquito hole, where willows, dwarf poplars and other stunted growth cast their reflections in stagnant ponds. The region is alluvial, and a few meters below the earth's surface there lies a layer of impregnable rock. Therefore the soil here was naturally marshy, and water collected in every depression. The land only dried out when the river level was lowered. I'm no engineer, but basically the trick was to get the water that couldn't seep into the ground to run off laterally: in many places subterranean streams now feed into the river and the ground has firmed up. At least it has for the most part, for if you know the region as Baushan and I do, you can still find many a reed-overgrown hollow downstream that harkens back to the land's original condition, remote areas where the damp keeps everything cool in even the hottest weather and where one gladly lingers for a couple of minutes on a summer walk to catch one's breath.

The entire region possesses its own curious individual character, distinguishable at a glance from the landscape of pines and mossy fields you might expect on the banks of a mountain stream. It has retained, I say, its
original
character, despite coming into the hands of the development company. Everywhere, not just in people's backyards, the original, native vegetation has the clear upper hand over that introduced and cultivated by man. The horse chestnut, the fast-growing maple, even beeches and various other ornamental tree types occur along the esplanades and on the public grounds, but they are all cultivated, not natural, as are the Italian poplars that stand in rows of sterile masculinity. Earlier I identified the ash as aboriginal, and it's quite widespread. You can find examples of all ages everywhere, from hundred-year-old giants to tender saplings that shoot up in great numbers like weeds from the sandy soil. It's the ash—together with the white poplar, the aspen, the birch and the willow in both tree and shrub form—that puts a
distinct stamp upon the landscape. These are all small-leaf trees, and small-leafiness—delicacy of foliage despite the often gigantic proportions of the trees themselves—is one of the regional flora's immediately striking features. An exception is the elm, with its broad serrated leaves, whose bright, sticky surfaces spread out toward the sun in large clusters. Great hordes of creeping vines also wind their way everywhere in the woods around the younger trees and confusingly introduce their own lush foliage in amongst that of their hosts. The trim figure of the alder may collect in little thickets wherever there's a hollow; the linden, however, seldom makes an appearance, the oak doesn't occur at all and neither does the spruce. Such varieties can be found on the slope bordering our grounds to the east, where, in different soil, more usual forms of vegetation take over. They tower there dark against the sky, keeping watch over our shallow valley.

No more than five hundred meters separate the slope and the river—I've paced them off myself. Although it may well be that the riverbanks fan out a bit upstream, the difference in breadth is insignificant, and it's therefore remarkable what a wide variety of landscape this narrow stretch of land has to offer. This holds true even if one makes only restricted use of the open space available along the length of the river, as Baushan and I do, hardly ever prolonging our excursions beyond two hours in total. The variety of scenery and the vast number of possible routes for walks—which keep one from getting bored or noticing the narrowness of the park—are directly attributable to the grounds themselves falling into three quite distinct realms or zones, which can be enjoyed one at a time or combined via sharply angled diagonal paths. These are the river and its immediate banks on one side, the opposite slope, and the forest in between.

Of the three, the widest is the forest, park, willow-thicket, or perhaps riverside-brush zone—I wish I could find a more accurate and vivid name for this extraordinary terrain than the word “forest,” yet it seems I can't. In no way are we talking about a forest in the usual
sense: a great cathedral with a floor of moss and straw and countless pillars of approximately equal dimensions. The trees in our hunting ground differ radically in age and size. Principally on the riverbanks but also deeper within, there are massive ancients of the willow and poplar families. Then there are others that are fully grown but only about ten or fifteen years old, and lastly there is a legion of tender saplings—naturally sown nurseries of wild ash, birch and alder that might seem haggard were they not, as pointed out earlier, shot through with winding creepers and thereby given an almost tropical lushness. Nonetheless, I suspect that these weeds actually retard the development of their hosts, for in all the years I've lived here I never observed any of these saplings to have made much progress.

The types of tree are few and closely related. The alder is a member of the birch family, and the poplar hardly differs from the willow. Moreover, you could even say that all of them tend to converge on the willow as a basic type, for as every forester knows, trees of various families tend to adapt together to an environment by imitating the lines and forms of the type originally predominant there. The lines that predominate here are those of the fantastically gnarled, witchlike willow, the faithful companion and neighbor of both running and standing water, whose sweeping limbs branch out in every direction like twisted fingers, and whose basic posture the other trees obviously attempt to emulate. The white poplar hunches over and can be quite difficult to distinguish from the birch, which, following the spirit of the place, also doubles up and grows extremely crooked—although I wouldn't deny the existence of numerous individual specimens of the latter, that, especially when lit by the colors of a flattering afternoon sun, appear quite well formed and are delightful to behold. The birch is well known in these parts as a thin silver stalk with a few scattered leaves at its crown—as a charmingly figured and neatly attired maiden with a pretty chalk white trunk, whose leafy locks dangle in languid beauty.
However, it also occurs in truly elephantine proportions, with a trunk far too thick for any man to get his arms around and a skin of true bark that turns white and smooth higher up while remaining rough, charred and cracked down below . . .