A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  In the courtyard of the Spanish Synagogue in Venice was a little garden that did not get much sun. An old man with a white beard was using a narrow hoe to make an intricate set of shallow irrigation canals around the base of several date palms. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and he talked to himself as he worked.

  Rafi stepped out from the palms, bound in jacket and tie. The rabbi looked up. "A funeral or a wedding?" he asked.

  Rafi shook his head.

  "Why are you dressed like that? Is it your nature?"

  "It's a habit that I picked up in going from office to office. Is the rabbi in?"

  The rabbi looked at the open sky. "It depends what you mean by in."

  "You're the rabbi."

  "You're looking for a job."

  "May I speak with you?"

  "Why ask permission for something you are doing already?"

  "As a courtesy."

  "Courtesy thrives at beginnings, and this is the middle. I'm not a Gypsy or a seer. If you want to talk to me, you have to do it in words."

  "It's difficult," Rafi said.

  "People confuse the meanings of time and difficulty."

  "I'm in love with a young girl."

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "Too young."

  "How young?"

  "Not quite a woman."

  "How do you love her?"

  "How?"

  "Yes. Do you love her physically, materially?"

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "She isn't ready for it."

  "Do you love her like a daughter?"

  "No, she's too old for that, and I'm too young."

  "What, what's all this? What is there, a year's difference in your ages?"

  "Eight."

  "I guess that's something, but not that much. Do you love her like a sister?"

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "I love her too much."

  "Thus far," the rabbi said, pushing his hoe, "everything is going very well, which is why you feel what you call difficulty. Without difficulty, you and she would be in terrible trouble. I can tell from the way you talk that you love her deeply, in perhaps the best way a man can love a woman. You love her well enough to come to see me.

  "You want to know what to do. You're not the first man to ask me such a question, nor even, I might add, the first woman. The first one to ask was me, and even I knew the answer, a long time ago, when I hardly knew a thing—and you know the answer now."

  "I didn't ask a question," the young attorney said.

  "It depends upon what you mean by ask. According to me, you asked. You're as red as a persimmon. Your eyes are wide, you're breathing slowly, and you're as still as a deer. To my mind that's asking. I know the right answer, and so do you: wait."

  "How long?"

  "Three years."

  "Three years?"

  "By then she won't be awed by you, and she'll have had the opportunity to reject you. You will have had time to prove that you love her not only for what she is now but for what she will be then, and for what she will become. What do you do for a living?"

  "I'm a lawyer."

  "In that case it will be easy to keep yourself busy for three years."

  "Can I see her?"

  "Of course you can see her. You have to see her. And you can let her know, but you must wait. It may be difficult. Learn to love the difficulty.

  "I assume she loves you? We'll have to start all over again if she doesn't. She does, doesn't she. Ah, yes, I can tell by your expression. Perfect! You look like a Christian Beatitude." The rabbi had forgotten to ask if she were Jewish. Perhaps he had assumed that she would be, or perhaps he sensed that it did not matter.

  ONE AFTERNOON late in August, Rafi was playing chess with Luciana in the garden. Everyone else was in the shade or in the house, sleeping, going mad with the scirocco, or, in Alessandro's case, buoyantly reading in a tub of cool water.

  Oblivious of the heat, Rail and Luciana sat on canvas chairs in the middle of the orchard, the chess set between them on an upended fruit box. Luciana's hair was by now the color of white gold, and her smooth sunburned skin was a perfect, even color, suggesting the shades of many of the buildings in Rome, but her eyes, in contrast, were polar blue.

  Mainly for her sake, they didn't use a chess clock. She took five or ten minutes to make each move, and was easily flustered. As soon as she moved, Rafi would follow, without pause. Never once did he ponder, always setting his position to right immediately. He calculated everything far in advance, kept several strategies alive simultaneously, and stared at her as she scowled at the board. He loved to watch her wintry eyes skip and slew in perfect symmetry across the field of battle on top of the fruit box. She was beautiful all the time, but she was most beautiful when she did not know she was being watched.

  "What do you have in mind for yourself, Luciana?" Rafi asked. "When I was your age I had decided to study law. It was tragic."

  "I don't want to study law," she said with the same tone as if she had been saying, I don't want to turn into a cockroach.

  "Having a family is the most important thing," said Rafi, "but it gets somewhat less interesting and somewhat more uniform if it's done well. I wondered if perhaps you might be thinking of something else, or something in addition."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. Playing the piano? Running away to the South Seas?"

  "No, but I don't dream of marriage, either, perhaps because I don't know who my husband will be." Even in the bright sunshine, she blushed and was forced to look down. "How can I think about marriage when I don't know what form it will take."

  "Then what do you have in mind?"

  "I've never told anyone," she said, as she looked around the garden at the cats sleeping soundly on the lower branches of the fruit trees, "but I'm not going to live in Rome. I'm not ambitious and I don't want an ambitious husband who will waste his life working for position. And I don't care about money."

  Rafi didn't know whether it had sprung from the mother, the father, or both, but the Giulianis were maddeningly the same.

  "I'm going to go north," she said, "to the mountains."

  Rafi fell back in his chair.

  "I haven't thought it out, but I'll just go there. It may be difficult at first—I'll settle in. It isn't that far, and we've always gone to the Alps in the summer."

  "Would you be content," he asked, "to marry a mountain guide, or a forester, or a local petty official—someone who, in comparison to a resident of the capital, would have little power, someone, as it were, offstage?"

  "I have another point of view. I've always thought that the most wonderful thing would be to live on a mountain farm, with sheep, goats, and vines. That would mean, wouldn't it, marrying a farmer, offstage or not. I think that the closer you are to power, the less you understand of what it is to be alive."

  RAFI FOUND a place to stay on the top floor of a building in Trastevere. Because the room was small and required the stamina of an alpinist to reach, it rented for next to nothing. Whereas someone in his situation might have squandered his money in restaurants and in the theater, and on clothing, cabs, and useless talismans like walking sticks and fancy watches, Rafi ate with the railroad workers, dressed modestly, and walked every place he went.

  The money he saved was for a house on a hill above an Alpine town. His windows gave out on the Gianicolo, where he could see the lights of the Giuliani house, and once a week or so he went there for dinner.

  Time passed, war was declared, the leaves vanished noisily and, then, after Christmas, it snowed. One day he brought a friend to dinner, a Milanese, and the Milanese provided a carriage that took them up the hill and would take them down again. After they had left the house and climbed back into the carriage, Rafi looked back and saw Luciana at the window of Alessandro's room.

  "Wait a minute," he said to the Milanese. "I've forgotten something."

  He ran into the house and up the steps. By the time he got to
Alessandro's room he was out of breath. Though Luciana turned to him, she remained at the window, and he remained at the door.

  "Luciana," he said. "I don't know how to say this. Your parents are downstairs and they must think I'm crazy. Luciana, I love you."

  Her answer was expressed first in her face and then in her breathing. "Will you wait for me?" she asked.

  "We'll only have to wait two years," Rafi told her. "That should be enough."

  Luciana moved her head from side to side, as if she were admonishing him, and then she raised her right index finger. "One," she said. "What anyone else thinks, what anyone else says, doesn't matter."

  IN FEBRUARY of 1912, plague ships called at Naples overnight with the wounded, the sick, and the dying, and an incessant gray rain fell on Rome. In thunderstorms and barrages of lightning it gradually became clear that those who had left in the previous bright October had reached a coast of hell. One could, if one knew to do it, measure the suffering and the pain indirectly in the accounts of bravery. It was easy to mark the journalists who had actually been there, as opposed to those who stayed on the ships and used binoculars, for the ones who had actually been there were transfixed by detail. One man seemed to think a particular water bucket was the saddest thing in the world after no one was left to drink from it. Another was moved by the electric lights on the ships that carried the wounded: as the ships made their way through storms in the Mediterranean the propellers would sometimes lift out of a trough in the waves and the lights would flare briefly as if in a divine signal for those whose last moments were to be on the winter sea.

  Alone in his room in Bologna, with a fire in the stove and a world of slate-colored clouds mounting in the sky, Alessandro was especially haunted by a journalist's account of artillery: Once you have heard it, whether from afar or close by, you will believe forever in things that you may never have known in a comfortable life. No thunder was ever as deep or as threatening for thunder comes from above and is preceded by light. Though artillery sometimes shows a broad white flash that turns night to day, it seems to have escaped from a fissure in the ground, and its deep and terrible sound has no relation to the aerial tantrums with which we associate it. No, the sound of artillery comes from below, and though its occasional rumbles and booms are as casual as rolling waves, it sets the soul afloat in a world of darkness.

  At the beginning of the new year, the name Alessandro Giuliani had appeared under articles in several of the most important newspapers in the country. Although he was neither the best, the best known, nor the most effective critic of the war, he held a special place because his prose had extraordinary power and not the slightest trace of bitterness. The opposition often sounded so much like warriors that no one believed them when they professed to be against war. Alessandro, on the other hand, was all strength, and uninterested in fault-finding, punishment, guilt, or accusation. He wanted only to do what was right—not for some vague notion of humanity, or for the sake of the Turks, or for socialism, but for Italy. This discipline and appearance of balance brought him a following, and his readers assumed that he was a man at least twice his age. Throughout January, he strengthened, his arguments grew clearer, he learned not to fear repeating them, and he enjoyed the newfound power with which he could move the country—even if only a little—while sitting in his chair, pen in hand, trying to touch upon the truth.

  Toward the end of the month, when clouds of swallows were still in perpetual motion above the tree-lined boulevards, he came home from Bologna, bringing with him reprints of his articles in several newspapers and journals. He knew that his father and mother would be proud, and he hoped that Lia would be impressed even if she did not agree.

  He arrived at his house just as Rome was beginning to get dark. His father had returned early, and before Alessandro had even removed his coat he dumped the reprints on the dining room table. The attorney Giuliani was now an old man. It had happened without anyone's knowledge, as if no one had been paying him the proper attention. He took out his reading glasses, switched on a light, and began to read.

  "Will Rafi come tonight?" Alessandro asked.

  "Rail's in Paris," Luciana answered.

  "What's he doing there?"

  "For the firm," Alessandro's father answered, looking up briefly. "An Italian collier was hit in the harbor at Cherbourg. We're suing the French owners of the ship that rammed it."

  Alessandro's mother looked at him with the kind of expression that he thought signified something that only she could take seriously, such as, was he going to appear before his professors in a torn shirt? "Didn't you get my letter?" she asked.

  "I didn't get it," he answered, with the peculiar satisfaction of someone who has genuinely failed to receive a letter.

  "Then you don't know."

  "Don't know what?" Alessandro felt a shock of fear, as if he were looking over a great height. Lucianas eyes got teary, and his father looked up from the editorial that he had been set to read, as if he didn't intend to finish it.

  "What is it?" Alessandro asked, rising from his chair. He wanted to know immediately. "Did someone die? Who died?"

  Signora Giuliani closed her eyes and dipped her head.

  "Who?" he asked, now weakly.

  "Elio Bellati."

  Luciana was weeping, and Alessandro couldn't understand why. She was shaking as if she had seen it with her own eyes.

  As her mother went to comfort her, her father stood up, removed his glasses, and faced his son. "Alessandro, they tore the body to pieces...."

  Alessandro dropped into his chair. "How do you know?"

  "It was reported. He wasn't the only one. There were many."

  "What about Lia? Have you seen her since?"

  "I think you'd better get used to doing without her, Alessandro."

  "Why?"

  "Because that's the way things work."

  Later, Alessandro walked through the garden, which was covered with wet and rotting leaves. Though only a few lights were burning in the Bellatis' house, he opened the iron gate. A servant whom he had never seen came to the door, an old man who appeared as if he specialized in temporary work in houses of mourning. His manner was a buffer for every emotion and every request. If asked to bring the paper, he would have said, "Just a moment. I'll go to see if perhaps one has arrived."

  Alessandro announced himself. The servant went away, and returned. "Perhaps you can leave your card."

  "I don't have a card," Alessandro told him. "I live across the garden."

  The servant gently shook his head. "They won't see you," he said.

  III. HIS PORTRAIT WHEN HE WAS YOUNG

  IN OCTOBER of 1914 Alessandro went on horseback from Bologna to Rome. He was young, the weather was beautiful, and Europe was at war. Though Italy had remained neutral, Alessandro was sure that the newly unified country would find the test of combat irresistible, and that he would be forced to take his place in the front lines. During the mad days of August, the attorney Giuliani had expressed the sudden desire that his only son should go to America, but Alessandro rebuffed all efforts to remove him from danger, protesting that only a few months remained before the confirmation of his doctorate, and that he had to be present for the final examinations.

  "You can come back," his father had said.

  "Why leave if I'll come back?" Alessandro had asked, and then had quoted Horace. "'New skies the exile finds, but the heart is still the same.'"

  His thoughts had been not merely of practicalities and not merely of Latin poetry but of the girl in the Villa Medici. Had he known her name, or that he had been close to her on the street half a dozen times without realizing it, or that from his window he could see her house far away across the Tiber, his life might have been different. More than once he had seen her lamp light amidst the ten thousand lamps of evening, so distant that it flickered like a star.

  Now he had been riding since early morning, when it was cold and the moon had refused to abdicate, hanging delicately over a
pine-covered hill, as bashful as a doe, and as still. At the highest point of a ridge that seemed to run diagonally across all of Tuscany, he dismounted, quieted Enrico, and looped the reins around a pine bough sticky with resin. A few steps took him out of the shade and into the clear, close to a cliff that dropped away until the land rose up again in a line of mountains far to the north.

  He tilted his head slightly and looked at the light over the horizon. To the north the air was tortured and quick, undulating like the air above a fire and bending the light into untrustworthy contortions. Somewhere along the line of sight, under the canopy of pale blue, was France and the war. Rooted in the stillness, Alessandro was like a farmer watching a blaze consume the forest at the edge of his fields.

  The world was going to be torn to pieces. In the driving apart of so many families, every family would be driven apart; in the death of so many husbands and sons, every husband and son would die; in the anarchy and gravity of suffering, God's laws would emerge in all their color, hardness, and injustice. Were Alessandro to survive he would have to start anew, but he wondered if, left with nothing familiar and no sign of anyone he loved, he would be able even to think of starting over.

  Alessandro took in the grace of the surrounding landscape like a blind man whose vision is suddenly restored not in a small room in a clinic but on a high and windy promontory overlooking half the world. Before him were rounded green hills, floating clouds, a river, pines, and a distant line of mountains. Though the only noise in the forest was the chatter of birds, he was able to hear music that he took from memory and fused with the sound of wind in the trees. From the fullness of the clouds, the arc of a swallow, and the sparkling of the sun upon a shattered river, came sonatas, symphonies, and songs.