Indeed, the last cash export from Semper Vero was the leeches found in abundance in the swamps, for apothecaries still thrived upon the margins of the Central Empires. The peasants would gather them in barrels and leave them in a shed, then Mother and I with a gaggle of peasant children would sort and bathe each wretched creature twice. Grading them by weight, we sewed them into linen bags forty centimeters long, to be picked up and taken to market by hawkers, usually the Fleischman brothers of later distillery fame. But the inexorable advance of medical science finally reached even our part of the world, and as bleeding went out of fashion, and plethoric, overfed gentlemen took to the waters, the value of our leeches necessarily became less, and our last source of hard currency flowed away.
Save a milk cow, the cattle were butchered, and most of the fields reverted to scrub, causing a new chain of wildlife to establish itself with startling rapidity. Hawks clotted the afternoon sky. Foxes became bold as leopards. Storks stalked adders. Pigs charged horses. Cranes and eagles strutted everywhere, and fat, sleek owls sat like avenging buddhas in the crotches of conifers. Meanwhile, in my father’s breast a great happiness arose, even as his business continued to fail, for just as the French have the mystique of their fields and the Germans of their forest, my father’s religion was the edge, that manmade, regenerative tangle of stumps, burn-offs, inexplicable wetnesses, and covers, which the animal kingdom in its colonial period prefers above all things, and which provides the final illusion to townspeople who need to believe they are descended from great hunters and perspicacious gatherers. It was the happiness of watching agriculture and all its bonds and shackles being erased.
Still, Semper Vero had to be rescued from its own mountain of debt, accumulated over centuries, and for a time my parents staved off the inevitable with tennis and French lessons for the gentry, whose heirlooms could still fetch cash. A walloping forehand and the languorous history of the future conditional allowed us a narrow margin for error in our decline. However, the day came when it was necessary to either sell off more fields or offer new services, and it was then that we began to take in others’ animals and pets. After realizing that none of the locals would pay good money to ameliorate a bad dog, Father ultimately took out a large ad for obedience training in the Sunday Therapeia Tagblatt:
TIRED OF YOUR DOG?
We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet, and of all forms of life which surround us, not one, save the dog, has chosen to make an alliance with us. It is not necessary to settle for just a pet.
Specializing in nervous peeing, uncontrollable boors, and promiscuous barkers.
Characterological reconstruction for the hardheaded, highly strung, and stupidly dependent.
Serving the owner willing to admit his own errors.
You may reply in confidence.
FELIX A. PSALMANAZAR, L.L.D.
SEMPER VERO
MUDDY ST. HUBERTUS
CANNONIA INFERIORE
SCHARF (Iulus)
The only reply was from the Professor, who cabled immediately from Therapeia and made an appointment for the following week.
He arrived en famille, driving the coach heavy-handedly. In the boot of the closed black calèche, tied with a rope from his neck to the axle, sat a rude and mixed-up breed. They called him “Scharf.”
My father ambled out to meet his first client, dressed in his smoking jacket, a freshly killed woodcock hanging on a thong from his belt, and stared up with his glacial blue eyes at the city boy and his sad-faced, black-frocked entourage. The Professor stared back, perhaps taken aback to see what appeared to be a calm English gentleman in the touchy heart of Europe.
Scharf had leapt from the boot of the carriage to greet Father, but the rope to the axle brought him up short. The Professor moved quickly to disentangle him, and then, like a giant, mottled frog in harness, the animal dragged his black-suited master to Father’s patient hands. Felix quickly found the pressure points behind the strangely cut ears, and Scharf swooned as he massaged his bumpy skull. It was love at first sight — not of course, with Scharf, whose main problem was that he knew himself to be a pretext — but between the men, who now exchanged a considered handshake.
As the calèche emptied its contents, it became evident that the Professor was encosseted with a company of women: his daughter, with piercing black eyes, hair plaited in a manner suitable for a grandmother, though she was five or six at the most; his mother, who had similar eyes and a firm peasant jaw beneath an outrageous red velvet hat of the newest style, looking thirty years younger than her age and unembarrassed by her aura of total self-absorption; and finally his wife, a plain, pale, humorless woman who could have been thirty or sixty, clearly ill at ease in the great out-of-doors — a woman, he surmised, who either suffered from sleeping sickness or had been traumatized by giving life. The Professor’s attitude toward them all was at once devoted, exacting, and absent, and for Father too they quickly disappeared from his mind forever.
“Welcome, welcome to the land of the three wishes.”
Mother had appeared on the veranda in all her golden glory, hair falling about her shoulders, a welcome tray of raspberry-colored spritzers in her hands. Entranced, the Professor dropped the rope and dreamily advanced up the curving stair, clearly disoriented but homing in on Mother’s golden bee. She said something sweetly inaudible, and his right hand came up to his heart as he bowed. Felix was gazing into Scharf ’s eyes, the Professor into Ainoha’s. The other women held onto one another. The air was full of incipient disaster. But as the Professor toasted his hostess and greedily drank his spritzer, walking downstairs backward to regrasp the rope which Felix had held for him, Ainoha realized at once, as so many times before, that she had rendered the other women invisible and must immediately deal with the consequences. She set down the tray, descended the stair and pried the dour child’s hand from her mother’s. Then she took the dazed wife’s arm as a man might at a cotillion, and matching the fierce stare of the red-helmeted mother, escorted them all to the grove, where Cherith’s Brook careened around its stony corners, exposing the gnarled roots of horse chestnut trees and providing sufficient grottos and ladders for the least inquisitive of animals.