Death in Venice and Other Tales

  The hemorrhages, said the attendant, weren’t completely gone. Every once in a while there was still an outbreak. Where they came from was still an open question, but in any case they were harmless. If I wanted to be doubly sure, I could leave the dog here for further observation, or I could take him home, where the ailment would probably fade away with time. I took the woven leash from my pocket—I had deliberately brought it along—and said I would take Baushan with me. The attendant found that sensible. He opened the cage door, and we called Baushan’s name—alone and in unison—but he didn’t come. He just kept staring straight ahead at the limestone wall. On the other hand, he didn’t resist when I stuck my arm in the cage and dragged him out by the collar. With a hop he landed on his feet back at ground level and stood there, tail between his legs, ears flat, the very picture of misery. I collected him, gave the attendant a tip and went to the front office to settle the bill: at the rate of seventy-five pfennig a day plus a flat fee for the doctor’s initial examination, it came to twelve marks fifty. Then I led Baushan back home, enveloped by the sweet chemical-animal aromas of the clinic that clung to my companion’s fur.

  He was broken in body and soul. Animals are less inhibited, more primal, thus in a sense more human about the physical expression of their emotional states than we are. Phrases that, for us humans, refer only to our morale in a metaphorical sense remain true of them in their original, literal meaning, without simile or allegory—something refreshingly visual, in any case, for the eye. Baushan “went,” to use such a phrase, “with his head down”—that is, he actually hung his head for all to see, just as a worn-out workhorse stands at a carriage stop, with scabby legs and nervously twitching skin, his poor fly-besieged nose seemingly pulled down by some unseen anchor to the cobblestones. It was exactly as I said before: his two weeks at the university had returned him to that condition in which I found him the first day at the mountain inn. He was only a shadow of himself, I’d say, if that weren’t an insult to the shadow of the previously proud and happy Baushan. Except for the occasional whiff, the hospital odor he had brought back home yielded to repeated baths in the washtub, but, while baths may have a symbolic effect on human psychology, no amount of physical cleansing could restore poor Baushan’s spirits. On his very first day home I took him out to our hunting ground, but he just skulked along at my feet, his tongue hanging out like an idiot, and the pheasants enjoyed an extended holiday. At home he lay around for days just as in his cell, staring glassy-eyed into the distance, inwardly listless, lacking his former healthy impatience, not once begging me for a walk. On the contrary it was I who had to go find him and prod him from his spot by the doghouse door. Even his wild, indiscriminate devouring of food was reminiscent of his early days of ignominy. It was thus all the more gratifying to see how he later came to himself, how his greetings regained their devotedly playful fervor, how he once more came bolting from his house at my first morning whistle instead of trudging glumly forward, how he put his paws to my chest and snapped up at my face, how, once outdoors, his pride and enthusiasm in his own sporting prowess returned, how those gracefully adept postures and precipitous, taut-muscled pounces onto unseen creatures in the tall grass reappeared before my eyes . . . He forgot. The ugly and—for Baushan—so senseless incident receded into the past, and though he was incapable of resolution or true comprehension, time buried it, the same as must occasionally happen in relations between humans. Our lives went on, and the unspeakable incident fell deeper and deeper into oblivion . . . For several weeks, there were occasional outbreaks of redness around Baushan’s nose, but they became less and less frequent. Finally the strange symptom disappeared. It was gone, and no one cared anymore whether it was epistaxis or hematemesis . . .

  There I go again. I never intended to tell the clinic story. The reader must forgive my digression and return with me to the park, to the hunt we were enjoying before we were interrupted. Is the reader familiar with the whining howl a dog lets out when he summons his utmost energies in pursuit of a fleeing hare, this mix of rage and bliss, desire and ecstatic desperation? How often have I heard it from Baushan! It is passion—pure passion, hoarded, pent up, then savored in intoxicated joy—that echoes shrill over the landscape, and every time its frenzied cry reaches my ear, from near or far, a pleasant shiver runs down my spine. Happy that today Baushan is getting his full due, I hurry forward or off to one side to follow the chase, if possible, and as it flashes past, I stand, transported and transfixed, despite the inevitably negligible result of the adventure, and watch, a smile of excitement tugging at my face.

  The hare? A dime a dozen. Scared of its shadow. Dragging its ears through the air, its head pressed into its neck, it runs for its life, scampering away from the soulfully howling Baushan in long leaps, kicking its hind legs and light yellow bottom into the air. And yet at the core of its fearful, flight-inclined soul, it must know that it’s in no serious danger, that it will surely escape, just as all of its brothers and sisters have previously in this situation—perhaps as it itself has once or twice already. Baushan has never caught a hare in his life and won’t either, since it’s practically impossible. A pack of dogs may be a hare’s death, as they say, but one alone will never get the job done, even one with much better speed and endurance than Baushan. For the hare can always resort to “doubling,” which Baushan cannot, and with that the outcome of the contest is preordained. It is the infallible weapon and talent of a creature born to flee, an ever available escape route that it keeps in reserve and knows how to use at the very moment when Baushan’s hopes are highest. And when it is used, Baushan and all his hopes are sunk.

  Here they come, angling through the brush, across the path before me toward the river, the hare silent in the knowledge of his inborn trick, Baushan howling his high-pitched whine. Don’t howl, I think. You’re expending energy, lungpower, breath you should conserve and use all at once to catch up! So I think because in my heart I’m involved in the chase, because I’m on Baushan’s side, because I too feel his passion and am anxiously rooting for him, even at the risk of having to watch him dismember the hare before my eyes. How he runs! It’s beautiful and gratifying to see a creature exercising every muscle to its fullest. He can run faster than the hare, having the stronger musculature, and the distance between the two has shrunk noticeably when I lose sight of them. I hurry behind, without clear direction, turning left through the park toward the riverbank, arriving on the gravel path just in time to see the chase flash by from the right. It’s an exciting chase, full of promise, with Baushan at the hare’s heels. He’s ceased howling; he’s running with clenched teeth, the proximity of the scent bringing out his best effort. One last leap forward, Baushan! I think. And I want to shout: “Steady now! Take good aim, and watch out for doubling!” But the doubling has already occurred: the worst has happened. In the very instant Baushan makes his decisive leap, the hare veers off at a short, mischievous right angle from his line, sending Baushan flying straight past its rear end, howling helplessly and kicking up gravel and mud as he tries to apply the brakes. By the time he sets off in the new direction—I should say, by the time this somehow comes about under his plaintive howls of torment—the hare gets a considerable head start toward the woods and in most cases loses its pursuer entirely, for during his futile attempt at braking, the latter can’t see in which direction his quarry is turning.

  It’s no use, I think, as the frenzied chase continues in the opposite direction through the park and then disappears. It’s beautiful, but fruitless. You need more dogs, five or six at least, a true pack. Others have to attack from the flanks, cut him off in front and make him pull up, then grab him by the neck . . . And my overheated imagination envisions a throng of thoroughbreds with outstretched tongues pouncing on a hare in its midst.

  It must be my own hunting impulse that makes me daydream of such things. After all, what has the hare ever done to me that I should wish upon it such a horrible end? The reason is that Ba
ushan is more like me, and therefore I sympathize with and root for him. On the other hand, the hare is a living creature too. It’s not personal malice that makes it frustrate my hunter, merely the fervent desire to continue nibbling tender young leaves and reproducing itself a little while longer. Nonetheless, I can’t help thinking—with a glance down at my walking stick—that everything would be different if I weren’t just holding my harmless cane, but an implement of graver intent, lightning quick and effective at a distance, which I could use to aid Baushan’s valiant effort, dropping the hare, so that it halted in its tracks with a final airborne somersault. No other dogs would be needed then: Baushan’s work would be done as soon as he flushed his prey. As things stand, however, it’s Baushan who does somersaults when he tries to follow the cursed “double.” Sometimes the hare does the same, but for it, somersaulting through the air is just a minor stumble, a trivial, even expected setback that in no way shakes the little creature, whereas it not only deflates Baushan’s morale but puts him at risk of a broken neck.

  Most of these chases are over in a few minutes, as soon as the hare puts on a burst of speed and succeeds in ducking under the cover of the brush or loses its pursuer with doubling and feinting, so that he stops short in uncertainty, springing this way and that, while I yell to him in futile blood lust and use my stick to point him in the direction I saw the hare jump away. Often, though, the chase extends far and wide across the land, Baushan’s soulful yowl like a hunting bugle in the distance, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther off again, while I go silently on my way, knowing he’ll return. And good Lord, the shape he’s in when he does finally turn up! Foam drips from his mouth, his chest heaves, his legs bow and his tongue hangs down from his jaws, which gape crooked and wide. His watery, intoxicated eyes are distorted into a Mongolian slant as he stands huffing and puffing like a steam engine. “Lie down and rest, Baushan, or you’ll die of a lung seizure!” I tell him, pausing so that he has time to recover. In winter, when the weather is frosty, I worry about him sucking great gulps of icy air into his overheated insides and belching out clouds of steam as he wolfs down whole mouthfuls of snow to quench his thirst. Yet as he lies there looking up wild-eyed at me, lapping now and then at the foam on his lips, I can’t resist the temptation to tease him a bit about the invariable futility of his efforts. “What about the hare, Baushan?” I ask him sometimes. “So you’re not bringing me a hare?” And he thumps his tail on the ground, suppressing the rapid pumping of his chest for a moment at the sound of my voice and lapping sheepishly with his tongue. He doesn’t understand that my teasing is intended to conceal, from both of us, my shame and guilty conscience at my failure to assist him during this exchange, at my not being the man to “drop” the hare like a real master. He doesn’t understand, so I tease him and pretend he’s somehow to blame for everything . . .

  Strange things happen on these hunts. Never will I forget the time a hare ran into my arms . . . It was by the river, on the narrow and muddy upper promenade, to be exact. Baushan was flushing game, and I came running from the brush toward the riverbank, beating my way through the thistles of the gravel embankment and springing down the grassy slope onto the path. At precisely that moment the hare appeared, about fifteen paces in front of Baushan, fleeing in long hops from the ferry house, in whose direction I was facing, straight down the middle of the path toward me. My initial violent huntsman’s impulse was to seize the opportunity of blocking the hare’s escape and to drive it back, if possible, into the jaws of its torturously yelping pursuer. Thus I stood, rooted to the spot, gripped with excitement, moving not a muscle except to weigh my walking stick in my hands, as the hare approached. I knew it would have poor eyesight; hares rely on sound and smell to warn them of danger. Perhaps it would mistake me for a tree—that was my strategy—and I desperately hoped it would fall into this fatal trap, whose possible consequences I had hardly thought out but intended nonetheless to exploit. Whether the hare did at any time actually make this mistake is uncertain. Personally I think it only noticed me at the last second; but what it did then was so unexpected that in a flash all my schemes and plans were undermined, and I felt a devastatingly sudden change of heart. Was it crazy with fear? Whatever the case, it jumped up toward me just like a lap dog, scrambled up my overcoat with its front paws and buried its outstretched head in my lap, in the horrible lap of the huntsman himself! Bent back at the waist, arms raised, I stood there staring down at the hare, who gazed back up at me, blinking. It may have only lasted a second, or perhaps a fraction of a second, but the result was that I got an extraordinarily close look at my adversary. I saw its long ears, one sticking up while the other hung down, its large, bright, myopically bulging eyes, its cleft lip and long whiskers, the white on its breast and its tiny paws. I felt, or thought I could feel, its frantic little heart trembling. It was strange to see it in such detail and have it so close to me, the little demon of the region, the heartbeat within the landscape, the eternally fleeing creature I had only ever glimpsed for brief comical moments turning tail over hollows and fields. This same creature was now huddled against me in its moment of greatest need and despair, clinging to my knees, clinging to the knees of the man who was not only Baushan’s master but the master of hares as well, i.e., its own master as much as Baushan’s. As I said, this lasted but a second; then the hare let go. It stood once more on its own dissimilar legs and sprang up the embankment to the left. Meanwhile, taking its place, Baushan approached with his hunter’s halloo and all the other headnotes of passion. These, however, were cut abruptly short once he arrived, for a well-aimed, clearly intentional cane blow from the master of the hare sent him whimpering and stumbling on temporarily lame hindquarters down the right slope of the path, which he had to limp back up before he could resume late pursuit of his no longer visible prey. —

  Finally, I would also like to address a few words to the hunting of one last sort of game, aquatic fowl. This only takes place in winter and in the colder months of spring—before the birds relocate from their provisional stop in the city on behalf of their stomachs to the mountain lakes—and isn’t as exciting as chasing hares can be. It does, however, have its own appeal for both hunter and dog, or rather, for hunter and master. The appeal for me is largely scenic, since hunting fowl entails immediate proximity to running water, but it also entertains and amuses me to observe the subsistence routines of these amphibious creatures, forgetting in the process my own, to take imaginative part in theirs.

  Ducks enjoy an easier, more stolidly bourgeois existence than gulls. They almost always look full and seem to worry little about getting food, for what they require will most probably be there for the taking, and thus their table is always set. As far as I can see, they will eat just about anything: worms, snails, insects, even mouthfuls of pure slime. This leaves them plenty of time to sit on the stone riverbanks in the sun—bills tucked under their wings, napping and greasing their feathers, so that the water practically never touches them but rather beads up and runs off the surface—or just to swim around for fun on the rapid current, their tails in the air, spinning and turning with complacently shrugged shoulders.

  In contrast, there’s something wild, ragged, bleak and drearily monotonous about the gulls’ existence. An aura of coarseness that only comes from a life of hunger and theft surrounds the great cawing flocks of them that circle the waterfall nearly all day, their flight paths crisscrossing that spot where the brown runoff from distant sources gushes from a drainpipe into the river. Diving for fish, as this or that one does from time to time, never yields enough to satisfy their roving mass hunger. Often, even if their crooked beaks are able to snatch something from the river and carry it to shore, they must content themselves with nothing more than some unappetizing tidbit. The gulls aren’t especially fond of the riverbank. But they do huddle in dense packs on the outcroppings that protrude from the river during the low-water season, so that these are blanketed by their whiteness, just as the rocks and sma
ll islands of the northern seas are often covered with white swarms of nesting eider geese. It’s splendid to see how they start cawing and take to the air en masse when frightened by the menacing barks that Baushan directs from the riverbank across the intervening water. They needn’t feel threatened—there’s no real danger. His natural aversion to water notwithstanding, Baushan wisely and understandably exercises caution around the river’s current, to which his strengths would never be equal and which would sweep him off downstream to God knows where, perhaps all the way to the Danube, leaving him in certainly rather grotesque shape by the time he arrived. The bloated corpses of the cats we always see after winter storms are sufficient proof of that, and he never wades past the point where the water washes over the first rocks. Though he may be tantalized by the impulse to give chase and indeed acts as if he were about to plunge into the river swells, the very next instant, without a second to spare, you can count on good judgment asserting itself over passion. The attack goes no further than a pantomime running start and some extreme-looking preparations—nothing but bluff, not dictated by passion, but rather cold-bloodedly calculated to scare his web-footed adversaries.

  And in the end, the gulls have too few brains and too little spine to laugh off his machinations. There’s no way Baushan can get at them, but he can send his threatening bark across the water in their direction. It makes contact, being also a kind of physical presence, and the attack is too frightening for them to withstand for long. No doubt they try to maintain their position, but a nervous shudder runs through the group. They look over their shoulders; first one, then the other lifts its wings just in case; and then suddenly the whole congregation takes to the air under bitter and dire squawking like an opaque cloud. Back on the rocks, Baushan jumps this way and that in order to disperse them and keep them in motion, for movement is all he cares about: they can’t be allowed just to sit there—they have to fly, either up- or downstream, so that he can give chase.