A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  Now his voice began to rise, and Alessandro realized that at the end of the interview he would be raving.

  "And then come adverbs, wrongly used prepositions, et cetera. We correct them. We have to. And we hold our masters in no little contempt when they are cripples with the pen.

  "Ah, but then where is the great mortal leap! I'll tell you. It's when the exalted one infuses into the body of a scribe sufficient quantities of the sap that flows in the boiling passages of the bony valleys of the moon...." Orfeo suddenly jumped as if a pin had been thrust into him. "And Mars!" he said, apoplectically.

  "What?"

  "Yes, the mortal leap is a gift of holy gracious sap from the exalted one."

  "I don't understand, Orfeo."

  "It means I write what I choose!"

  "You do?"

  "Yes. Yesterday, for example, a battalion of the bersaglieri was supposed to have been moved to a new sector on the Isonzo, but I withdrew them to an encampment in the Po Valley, took away their machine guns, and issued them vast amounts of beef."

  "Why?"

  "Because," Orfeo said, gravely, "when the world ends, the cloak of the exalted one will drag across the Po Valley."

  "Christ, Orfeo," Alessandro said.

  "That's nothing! You think the king himself has escaped my sap-driven edition? Not a word that comes from him through me is unchanged—subtly, of course, but it's necessary for me to put my stamp on history by jumbling it apart and putting it back together."

  "All revolutionaries think that, Orfeo," Alessandro stated, "and they're never as good at putting it back together as they are in jumbling it apart."

  "I'm not a revolutionary," Orfeo said. "I'm the conduit, the reservoir, the nozzle of the blessed sap that pounds against the bone-dry valleys of the moon. The sap makes the birds fly. It whistles through their hearts like the spray of a fountain."

  "Orfeo."

  "When explosives from Factory Thirteen in Pisa are supposed to go to Factory Six in Verona to be stuffed inside artillery shells, I send them to Milan for packing into flares. I run the war the way I see fit, and I've been doing a good job, because I've been blessed by the exalted one, who has directed at my person great quantities of invigorating sap.

  "The gracious one has ushered me to this spot because my destiny is to invigorate the armies and liberate the world from common rabbits and scrugs. Though sometimes I want to stop short, to stop everything, and, instead of struggling or fighting, instead of Cumbrinal the Oxitan, and Oxitan the Loxitan, I would look up at the light and ask God to take me up and show me what is great and make it so I don't have to wait anymore. I could fly. My back would not be bent. I would not have a hump. I would be handsome. I would be light. I would be tall." He smiled, and then he placed his finger on the side of his nose. A scribe at one of the many long tables had asked permission to pee, and Orfeo had granted it.

  "Orfeo, my father needs this," Alessandro said, unfolding the paper with the name of the drug written on it.

  "Who wrote this?" Orfeo asked.

  "A doctor."

  Orfeo shook his head slowly back and forth. "The world is truly going to the dogs. I'll have a hundred thousand units sent to him tomorrow morning. Why are you always asking for favors?"

  "What favors, apart from this?"

  "I've been doing you favors all along."

  "You have?"

  "Who do you think got you in the River Guard; what was it, the Ninth?"

  Alessandro was suddenly weakened by rage. He could hardly speak. "You?" he asked.

  "Me, the male, the one."

  "Why?"

  "You were supposed to have been put on the Euridice, that's why. I had a bad feeling about it, so I moved you to the River Guard. How many survived the Euridice? You see? I was right.

  "I'll do you favors, yes, because I owe you a certain amount of respect and gratitude, but gratitude is not immortal. I have to turn from the past to the gracious sap. Quite frankly, Alessandro, I'm running to the end of my tether with doing the Giulianis favors. Now, I'm the important one. I don't quake anymore. I don't have to sit and eat my own sap. I'm the chief scribe. As my powers well through my fingers, I touch the soft open eye of the monster that is eating the century. Cumbrinal the Oxitan. Oxitan the Loxitan. Loxitan the Oxitan. I told you once that I'd ride upon his back Now I'm his master, the master of worlds. You drove me to it; the so-called 'typewriter' drove me to it.

  "Politicians and kings suffer the agony of constraint. Not I, I need merely dip my pen in the holy blessed sap and my orders are followed to the letter, with never any consequences for my person, which is totally anonymous. Ah, but I'm more than that, I'm blessed, I'm omnipotent, I'm baked in sap."

  Without even looking at Alessandro, Orfeo strode from his office and mounted the platform. Breathing heavily, he fixed his gaze upon an invisible horizon and declared so that the scribes and clerks would hear, "I am lightning! I am a lion!"

  "ORFEO IS completely mad," Alessandro told his sister in a thunderstorm with the rain beating against the windows of his room and the wind rising in gusts that propelled water through crevices that were supposed to have been sealed. "He sits on a platform amidst hundreds of scribes. He's supposed to copy orders and proclamations, but he changes them at will and composes new ones according to whim—always in the proper style and with the proper seals and codes."

  "Shouldn't someone be told?" Luciana asked innocently.

  "Who's going to tell?"

  "One of the scribes."

  "Them? They're terrified. They raise their hands even to ask permission to go to the water cabinet."

  "How can that be?"

  "They're young. If he fires them they go straight into the trenches. He has it all figured out. It's not because he's evil, but because of what he believes to be his mission."

  "The holy sap?"

  Alessandro nodded.

  "Alessandro, you must tell someone."

  "Me? It was difficult enough for me to walk into the Ministry of War. If I made an accusation about one of its employees the first thing they'd want to know is who I am. I might as well shoot myself now."

  "I'll tell them."

  "They won't believe you, and it probably wouldn't make any difference. Tomorrow they're going to deliver the medicine to the hospital. Let things rest for the moment."

  "They'll find out. He'll give himself away."

  "He's been there for two years, and seems quite comfortable."

  As a blast of wind blew ribbons of fog through the garden, Luciana turned her head to listen, and the shape of her long neck came clear. Luciana had become, as De Roos had put it, insanely beautiful. In the first week, Alessandro had done a great deal of looking away. To begin with it was easy and habitual, but then he could do it only by redirecting his attention, or by a deliberate relaxation in which he put all thoughts of her out of his mind. He wanted to touch her, to kiss her, and though his desire for her was so wrong that he likened it to setting off a bomb in the middle of the house, he was unable to banish the image of her delicate hands, her clear blue eyes, her hair the color of white gold.

  For the sake of his father, who lay dying in a hospital bed, and for the sake of his mother, who was already gone, he would not succumb to his sisters grace, to her peach-and-rose-colored flesh, and to her frazzled unguarded charm. After he was arrested, they would keep him in a cell, they would bring him one morning to a courtyard to stand him in front of a shattered wall, and he would see his life about to end. He wondered if at that moment he would think of Luciana, and he hoped that he would not.

  "We have to sleep," he said, rising, and turning to leave. She seemed almost offended, but as he walked down the dark hallway to his room, her door closed as it always had.

  Alessandro sat on his bed, listening to the rain. Without taking his feet from the floor he lay on his side as if he were embracing an invisible presence. He drew his arms closer to him, until they were clasped against his chest and his eyes were filled with
tears. And then, in a hopeless whisper, he said, "Papa."

  HE WAS awakened by cracks of thunder that threatened to shatter the windows. The rain was driven so hard that it backed up in the gutters and cascaded from the roof in solid curtains of water that turned silver when the lightning flashed. Rain like this emptied the streets and made the city into a lifeless model of itself. The Tiber would already be in flood and the only people outside would be the sentries who stood before palaces and ministries, and even they had little houses made for chocolate soldiers.

  Alessandro went to the long table, where he put his face close to the brass carriage clock that Luciana had always taken the trouble to wind, even when he was not there, even when his mother was dying of influenza. When she wound the clocks she walked all alone from room to room with the keys jangling in her hands. He could hear the ticking over the rain, though the rain was so hard that it sounded like gravel being spilled across metal sheets, but he couldn't see the hands. He turned to sight them through the corner of his eye, but it was still too dark. The ticking grew in intensity. He had no idea how long he knelt before the clock, staring at it without seeing, listening to the thunder of the machinery within.

  Then a bolt of lightning struck the Gianicolo somewhere close by, and the face of the clock was illuminated so brightly that its image was burned into Alessandro's eyes for minutes. The hour hand held its breath and pointed off to the right halfway between two and three, the minute hand had succumbed to gravity and was resting at one notch before the half hour. Now Alessandro was wide awake, and he pulled on an oilcloth jacket and went downstairs with an insatiable craving to go into the night.

  It was raining so hard that the water ran down his neck and soaked his shirt. He entered the garden, which was covered in a shallow pool of water exploding in a hundred thousand places as the rain beat down upon it. At one point he bent over and pressed his palm against the white gravel on the path in the center, as if it were the bed of a stream. Gusts of wet wind lashed at him from all directions as the trees and hedges shuddered under the weight of the rain.

  THE NEXT day was sunny, clear, and unusually quiet. Rome sometimes became as dramatically silent as if everyone had left it. You could hear the wind rushing through leaves and reeds just as it did at the seaside, and the sky was a deep, dizzying, oceanic blue. Children were in shady classrooms, clerks wrote their figures in cool shadow, and the tops of the trees glistened in the sun like sequins.

  Alessandro and Luciana sat near the window in their father's hospital room, listening to him breathe in his sleep. The sun came in sharply, bathing the blood-red geraniums in a window-box in unworldly fluorescence and drawing a sharp black triangle of shadow on the butter-colored sill. Now and then cool air lifted the curtains inward and dropped them again, as if they were riding on the waves.

  In waiting for their father to awaken, they could not talk, but sometimes their eyes met. When nurses looked in they saw two exemplary young people, healthy and strong, dressed like patricians. Their father himself was handsome and imposing, he spoke well, he was engaging, he was obviously a man of great resources. On this cool October day, the Giulianis appeared to be in control.

  The nursing-sisters came quickly when the attorney Giuliani called. Nothing was forgotten, every service requested was provided, and De Roos or the other doctors who made their rounds—specialists in infection, the heart, and Röntgenology—had long technical conversations with Alessandro, thus keeping him far better informed than most of the other supplicants who were drawn daily to the hospital.

  Alessandro thought that if he paid and demanded close attention he might catch a fault in treatment or stimulate the doctors and nurses to do so, and that if he kept up the privileged bearing that, oddly enough, had begun as a fugitives method of evading capture, he could provide for his father a small margin that in desperate circumstances might be critical in preserving his life. He had seen it a thousand times in the River Guard: impeccable, careful, meticulous soldiers seemed to survive longer, or at least to be more conspicuous as they survived, though, of course, even they were sometimes instantly disemboweled by a shell that came from the blue.

  He kicked Lucianas white stocking. When she looked at him, he held up his finger as if to say, listen. Without the patience her brother had learned in two years' watch for infiltrating enemy soldiers, she went back to her dreaming.

  He kicked her again, and pointed down the hill.

  She leaned forward. She could just barely hear a noise somewhere in the streets that fell to the Tiber.

  "That's a horse pulling a caisson."

  "How do you know?"

  "I've spent two years with the sound."

  For the next five minutes Alessandro listened to the clip clop of an army-shod horse and the distinctive squeaking of a caisson. As they came up the hill in the sunshine, he heard them through the red and green of the sunlit geraniums, and he felt the wind that carried the sound.

  Guided by a soldier who seemed to be sleepwalking, the horse drew up to the hospital. The soldier looked at the sign on the hospital's wrought-iron gate, and then, with the deep depression of a private who has drawn garrison duty and been doomed to spend the most adventuresome period of his life as an office boy, opened the top of the caisson and took out a large package.

  Luciana was by now leaning over the sill, and her hair caught the sun like a flair. "Perhaps Orfeo isn't as mad as we think," she said.

  "No," Alessandro corrected. "Orfeo can give the medicine to dying soldiers only because he has taken it from dying soldiers."

  "That isn't mad. It's neutral."

  "It's by no means neutral, Luciana, it's violent and it's mad."

  The attorney Giuliani awoke, breathing as if he were resting after a foot-race. His eyes went first to the blank walls, then to the sunlight, and then to his children. Though awake, he seemed in some ways like a man who is asleep. His breathing was labored and loud, his eyes were glassy, and he hardly moved.

  "Did you hear the thunderstorm, Papa?" Luciana asked.

  The attorney Giuliani turned to his daughter, waiting for her to explain. His expression showed that he had no memory of a thunderstorm. "I missed it," he said weakly.

  "It was tremendous!" she announced with such enthusiasm and buoyancy that Alessandro smiled. "Ten bolts of lightning hit so near the house, and in such rapid succession, that I thought I was going to fall down. I had the same feeling of being out of control that you get in a boat that is too small on a sea that is too windy!"

  "It's a blind," her father said.

  "What's a blind?" Alessandro asked.

  "Memory of things like days at the sea, or thunderstorms."

  "I love those things," Alessandro said. "You can't imagine how much I love them."

  "Alessandro, in memory, things, objects, and sensations merely stand in for the people you love." He had to rest and breathe before he continued. After a while, he said, "If I long for a thunderstorm in Rome sixty years ago, or seventy, for the heavy rain and the disheveled lightning, for the wet trees that were completely free and completely abandoned, it's not because of the rain, or the quiet, or the ticking of the clock in the hallway—all of which I remember—but because of my mother and my father, who held me at the window as we watched the storm."

  "Papa," Alessandro said, with assured optimism, "the medicine came this morning, in an ammunition caisson. Orfeo sent it. The hospital didn't have any, but now they can stabilize your heart. Now you'll be able to fight the fever with all your strength, and in a week or ten days we'll bring you home."

  "Sandro, what do my eyes look like?"

  "They're all right," Alessandro said, though his father's eyes were cloudy and gray.

  "You know what happens?"

  "When?"

  "You betray your parents."

  "Papa, you're talking nonsense."

  The attorney Giuliani shook his head as if to signify that he agreed, but then he returned to what he had been saying. "When your p
arents die, Alessandro, you feel that you have betrayed them."

  "Why?" Luciana asked.

  "Because you come to love your children more. I lost my mother and father to images in photographs and handwriting on letters, and as I abandoned them for you, the saddest thing was that they made no protest.

  "Even now that I'm going back to them, I regret above all that I must leave you."

  "You're not going back to anybody," Alessandro told him. "We'll solve those problems later."

  "Alessandro," his father said, almost cheerfully. "You don't understand. This kind of problem is very special: it has no solution"

  LATER IN the morning, De Roos came in holding a hypodermic needle as if it were a dueling pistol. Drops of liquid emerged from the hollow end of the needle and slowly slid down the shaft. The attorney Giuliani was impassive.

  "We have it," De Roos announced. "A hundred thousand units. It'll hold us for months, a very great thing. What this does, Signore," he said, vigorously wiping the attorney Giuliani's frail arm with alcohol-soaked gauze, "is to make your heart as even and temperate as the heart of a young horse. Not as strong," he added, plunging the needle in, "but as even and as steady. And if your heart doesn't lag, doesn't race, and doesn't skip beats, you'll see, all will follow onto an even keel." He gripped the attorney Giuliani's hand, squeezed it, and quickly let go. "You have a good chance now, Signore. You have a good chance."

  "I hope so," the attorney Giuliani said quietly as De Roos left.

  "I'd be very grateful," he told his children, "if I could put this off, but, Alessandro, promise me that when the time comes you'll be with me."

  "I'll be there," Alessandro said, "if I'm still alive."

  "The house," the attorney Giuliani started to say, as if now he might inquire about the condition of the house that he had been convinced he would never see again, but he was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a group of orderlies and nurses clumsily wheeling-in a bed in which lay an unconscious soldier.