A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "That's what I mean," Nicolò said. "How did you get the time? My father, we never see him except Sundays. He's always worried. The only thing he's interested in about birds is how they taste."

  "After the war," Alessandro said, noticing that the east was a shade lighter than black, and, therefore, that the sun was climbing high in the sky over India and would soon light the Mediterranean, "as you might imagine, nurses and armed guards were not in short supply. Europe had more nurses than the rest of the world combined. You looked at a woman ... she was a nurse.

  "And an entire generation of boys had grown up with the rifle and bayonet the tools of their craft. For them nothing seemed quite as real as the trenches, so they didn't throw themselves into the traditional occupations with much fervor. They believed that peace was a dream, and they found it difficult to invest in an illusion. Some stayed in the army, or re-enlisted after a year or two on the outside. Some were bank guards. Because there weren't any jobs that we wanted to do, we ended up with the jobs that no one else wanted."

  "You were a gardener."

  "For a few years. Then I did something that, had they known of it, would have amazed most of my students of the past two decades."

  "What?"

  "For ten years, I was a wood-splitter in a lumber mill near the Tiburtina Station. I did it because I could set my own hours, and work as little or as much as I wanted."

  "I wouldn't split wood," Nicolò said.

  "Why not?"

  "It's the bottom."

  "I was content. I rose at five and was at work by six. Usually I'd split from seven in the morning until twelve. It was five hours of swinging steel, five hours of hand-eye coordination, and five hours' reverie. My hands smelled of deerskin and the sweet lichen on the bark, and I got home at one, by which time Ariane had been at work since ten and Paolo had stayed for three hours with Ariane's cousin, Bettina.

  "We'd have lunch, just Paolo and me, and set out at one-thirty, when everyone else was sleeping, and we'd walk. Sometimes we'd take a trolley and spend four hours coming back on foot. Sometimes we'd rush off, our lunches in a pack, and take an early train to the beach.

  "We did this nearly every day, and at five-thirty we'd be at the door of the hospital to meet Ariane. We'd eat on our terrace as we watched the lights of Rome ignite gently by the thousand, and the birds and bats swooping in the dusk, outlined against the sunset."

  "How much money did you make?" Nicolò asked.

  "You'd be surprised. Between the two of us we made enough to satisfy our modest needs, and our greatest expense was that we lived in a nice place, a run-down villa on the side of a hill, with walls deepened and darkened by age, not a single sharp corner, and steps with parabolic centers from centuries of footfalls on the stone. It was quiet there. Standing in its peaceful, ill-tended, and forgotten garden, it was a sanctuary that had survived a thousand years of war. The saffron-colored walls, softened by time, were a great shield for memory and tranquillity.

  "We ate simply, we were healthy, and we were uninterested in those things that should be called possessions not because they are possessed but because they possess. Those ten years were the happiest of my life save the first ten, the years in which I had neither position nor success, and no one took notice of me. Those were the years of the parent holding the child in his arms, lifting him high in the air, and pulling him close. As I held my own son, when he was a baby, God was right there."

  "So why did you quit?"

  "Quit what?"

  "The wood-splitting."

  "Past forty, I found it increasingly difficult to do that kind of work. I tired more easily. Injuries took far longer to heal. I needed much more rest. After Paolo started school we could no longer walk together every day. The three of us would go out on weekends, and we could go great distances. I think people thought we were tourists from Northern Europe—me, a blonde woman, and a light-haired child, all with knapsacks. Since when do Italians carry knapsacks? During a vacation one summer we took the Via Appia (where we could find it) from Rome to Brindisi, improvising along the way for eating and sleeping.

  "I carried a Mauser the whole distance, not because I hunted, but because on the mountain tracks of Southern Italy there were bandits. Now it appears to me to have been reckless, but at the time I had no doubt that, were we confronted, I would prevail. I knew where to sleep at night, how to watch in the day, and what to do should action have been necessary. The countryside was wide open and mountainous, so I felt at home, even with bandits."

  "You don't have to tell me," Nicolò declared admiringly. "You were a real killer."

  Alessandro smarted. "Yes," he answered, exhausted by implications that he no longer wanted to consider, "I was. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not ashamed, either."

  "You know," Nicolò said, "it bothers me. Someone like you, who could do anything he wanted, and you chop wood, which is what people like me are forced to do. Why did you choose it?"

  "You would have no right to be bothered unless I complained. I loved it."

  "That's because when you stopped you were a professor again, and then what do you do, you read books and you talk about them. Okay, I couldn't do it, but, if I could, I wouldn't call it work."

  "It's sad," Alessandro said, "that people in different walks of life should think that no one works but they, that no one has difficul ties but they. Most of these professors who you think don't work, don't think you work either. To them, what you do is worthless, and they believe that people like you are less than idiots."

  "It isn't work if you don't get tired."

  "But you do get tired. Your neck gets tired, and, for some people, the neck is important, because it holds up the head.

  "At the time, I had no way to be a professor or even to teach in a subsidiary position. The universities were in lock-step with fascism. Real intellectual independence simply wasn't tolerated. I had an appointment here or there, but I didn't stay. At first I simply could not stand the conformism and the cowardice, and then, with the results predetermined, I came up against the loyalty oaths and the informers. I would have left anyway. After having gone through the war, I couldn't understand my colleagues' willingness to quibble and take offense over the meaning of a passage, or to live, die, and divide for their idiotic theories and schools. And nearly everything they said seemed to be in contradiction to the truth of what I'd seen.

  "And yet if you ask me what that was, I can't tell you. I can tell you only that it overwhelmed me, that all the hard and wonderful things of the world are nothing more than a frame for a spirit, like fire and light, that is the endless roiling of love and grace. I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God's way of comforting His broken children.

  "Such a point of view does not lend itself to the lecture hall. No. I returned to the university only after the Second World War, and, even then, not having been in the resistance, I had political difficulties."

  "Why weren't you in the resistance?"

  "I was tired. And you have to have a certain temperament. You have to be fixed on the point. You need what politicians have, which is the absence of a sense of mortality. It comes, like a drug, from adoration and deference. Revolutionaries get it from dreams. They say that nothing is apolitical, that politics, the bedrock of life, is something from which you cannot depart. I say, fuck them.

  "I was interested in birds. Are birds political? And I thought the finest thing in my life was being with my son when he was a baby. People used to look at us when we went around in the daytime, and wonder what a man was doing taking care of a child, but every word that came from him, every expression, every smile, even his tears, were worth a million times an honorable profession.

  "I wrote my books then. They were not seditious in a political sense, being apolitical, though in some places being apolitical is the most extreme political statement you can make. Even Mussolini didn't find them seditious, despite my admir
ation for Croce. Still, I had to publish abroad, because the books were not written in the spirit of fascism and did not make obeisance to the themes and principles according to which one was deemed, or not deemed, acceptable. Salvemini helped me to publish in America, and I was able to make a small living. After the war, the books returned to Italy like a migration of birds. People said, 'Where has he been?' I said, 'I've always been here, where have you been?'

  "In the Thirties we began to receive income from the real estate on the Via Veneto, my father's gift to us, although, as it turns out, Luciana didn't need it. She married a man who just got richer and richer—it's like that in America, because they fight their wars at a distance, so, as a nation, they can keep what they make. She ceded her interest to us. For her, it was pin money.

  "I went to see her in nineteen fifty-five, a year after Ariane died. She lives on a big farm north of New York, and they grow champion sheep there. The sheep had so much wool that they could hardly move, and her sons used to roll them down the hill. Because they had been rolled down the hill since they were lambs, they didn't mind. You see, that's the difference between us and Americans. Our soil is too rocky to roll sheep downhill, but even if it weren't, do you think we would?"

  Nicolò moved his head slowly from left to right.

  "Of course not. It was very nice. It was sweet, in a way. It was funny. But it's not in my blood."

  "Tell me about America."

  "What's to tell? We went to a movie in a car, the museums are well lit, the Italians are really Sicilians, you can't get good coffee, and the newspapers have pictures of women in brassieres."

  "Did your sister become an American?"

  "Yes. She had been there a long time, and she spoke English almost without an accent, I think. It was easy for her to fit in because she's blonde and blue-eyed and they really like that. When I saw her, on the pier, in July of nineteen fifty-five, I cried. I didn't mean to. Her husband and sons were there, and Americans are not as emotional as we are.

  "I love my sister. I love her for many reasons, not the least of which is that she is the only link I have with my parents, my childhood—all those things that disappear. After forty years she was still beautiful, and she looked exactly like my mother. For an instant, I thought she was my mother, and because we were in a huge pier shed and beams of light pierced the blackness, the din, and the dust, I thought for a second, for less than a second, that I had come full circle. The last time I had seen Luciana, I had been under sentence of death in Stella Maris. So, we cried, and though we did not mention Rafi, then or later, I knew that she was crying for him."

  "Do her sons look like you?"

  "No, they look like their father. They fought in the Pacific. One was a fighter pilot, the other an infantryman. They told me they were sorry never to have met their cousin, my son, and they were not merely being polite, for they had been soldiers, and they knew."

  "THE HEART of it," the old man said, "is my memory of this boy, his mother, the men who were killed in the war, and my own parents. That is the problem I cannot resolve, the question I cannot answer, the hope I cannot relinquish, and the risk I must take. I have not forgotten them. May I tell you what, what it is..."

  "Yes," Nicolò replied. "I'll stay with you."

  "When it's light," Alessandro said, resolutely, "you'll go."

  Nicolò shrugged in acceptance. To him, the old man seemed lost, and though he suspected that parting from him might seem difficult and unnatural, he knew that, when it was light, he would.

  "Someday, Nicolò, when you get the chance, go to Venice to look at La Tempesta. Imagine then that, by the grace of God, the soldier would lose his detachment, and that, by the grace of God, the storm from which he had emerged would pass, and that by the grace of God the child in the woman's arms was his.

  "In Giorgione's painting you find very little red. The dominant colors are green and gold: green, of course, being the color of nature, and gold the divine and tranquil color of which, like perfection, so little exists. The painters of Giorgione's time, by and large, spoke in these terms. Red was the instrument with which they portrayed mortality; green, nature; gold, God. With notable exceptions scattered from painter to painter and school to school, you will find this born out subtly and simply.

  "You may not even have thought of red as anything more than just a color for decoration, but red is a most precious sign when you're at the bedside of someone you've just lost, for they haven't a trace of it. And red is the color of real love between a man and a woman. Its absence from the flesh in the act of love is far more profound than any protestation or vow. Indeed, in a marriage ceremony, red on a bride's cheek is her real vow, the rest useless and profane.

  "I think that had Giorgione painted a sequel to La Tempesta, in which the soldier moves to the woman and child, he would have reddened them and made parts of the landscape reverberate in crimson. All the gold and green, the lightning, the reflected sunlight, and the cool colors of the storm, make for a dream-like air. It's like floating in the clear summer shallows of the Aegean, or the separation of the body from its sensations prior to the separation of the senses from the soul before the soul's ascension. That is the natural course, and, upon it, Giorgione, and Raphael, and the others, predicated their work. In Dante, too, the colors are refined with the soul until, at the last, one has risen through lighter and lighter blues, silvers, and golds, and what is left is merely white with a silver glare, far too bright to see or comprehend."

  "What of it? What of it?" Nicolò asked, thinking that the old man was ranting, and would not be able to bring his talk of colors into focus.

  "What if you didn't want to go in that direction?" Alessandro asked with frightening urgency, so that the hair on Nicolò's arms and on the back of his neck stood up.

  "I still don't understand."

  "What if, after having come into the presence of God, in voiceless perfection, in the perpetual stillness that is yoked to perpetual movement, you asked nonetheless to be released, to go back, to descend, to go down, to revert. What if you chose, rather than silver and gold, and white that is too bright to comprehend, the lively pulse of red?

  "I have felt that perfection. I have had a glimpse of the light. I have a notion, perhaps more than a notion, of eternity in its flawless and unwanting balance. Compared to it, the brightest moments are but darkness; and singing, like silence. What great sin do I commit, therefore, if I hold that it is insufficient?

  "For when I put my arms around her, Ariane was red. Her cheeks and the top of her chest blazed like a burn, or rouge, and the color spread to her breasts and her shoulders and was only dilute once it had cooled by running, like a viscous waterfall, down the length of her back.

  "The baby followed his mother in this flash of her coloring like a chameleon following the light. She averted her eyes. She would not look up. Her lips trembled as if in prayer or concentration.

  "What if that moment had lasted? What metaphysical rapture could equal it for its substance, its frailty, and its beauty? Haven't we been taught that it's better to live in a simple house overlooking a garden or the sea than to reside in a palace of great proportion?"

  "What are you saying, Signore?" Nicolò asked.

  "I'm saying that now I know exactly what I want, and that though I doubt it fits the scheme of things, I'll chance it nevertheless."

  "What happened when you had a baby without being married?" Nicolò asked, returning, as always, to the practical, and pulling Alessandro with him.

  "She had the baby. I wasn't there."

  "You know what I mean."

  "Did I mention the priest in the Bell Tower?"

  "No."

  "In the Bell Tower, on the Isonzo, he would come to say mass, only it wasn't always on a Sunday, it was whenever he wasn't someplace else and the incoming artillery fire was light enough for him to hop through the communications trench.

  "The priest was named Father Michele. He was my age. He had an unusual way of speaking, and
everything he said seemed to have been questioned and examined just before it left him, as if he had a little inspection box in his head and each sentence underwent a merciless examination there in respect to its truth and its effect.

  "His expressions matched his manner of speaking. He had a big nose, deeply set eyes, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a mouth that was almost crooked and had gotten that way, I imagine, as he carefully pronounced each of his carefully chosen words.

  "A lot of soldiers interpreted his hesitancy as weakness. At first, I did, too, but, then, watching him, I realized that it was not weakness that made him think carefully and speak haltingly, but integrity. The need to assert puts us in the habit of assertion: he refused that habit, and spoke as if everything were new and untried.

  "One day—I don't even remember in what season or what the weather was like, for in the Bell Tower you sometimes saw nothing but a round circle of sky above the courtyard, and blue does not always tell you very much—he had come to say mass, and was pinned down because the Austrians had concentrated their guns on our sector and we had incoming fire around the clock.

  "No one was hurt until the following dawn. A soldier from Otranto ... I didn't really know him. He was seventeen or eighteen." Alessandro stopped, and turned directly to Nicolò. "He looked like you. He was young, and he had little to say, and when he spoke he always talked about his parents. His father was a stone mason, and the son revered him as if he were the Pope. Other soldiers made fun of him for it, which hurt him deeply. And his mother, well, you can imagine what he felt about his mother. And he still needed her.

  "I hardly knew him. At dawn he went into the courtyard to hang out his socks. Everyone would dash out for a moment or two for that kind of thing. It was a chance you took.

  "A forty-five-millimeter shell came in from nowhere. They were so small you didn't hear them until you couldn't do anything about it. It hit the ground at his feet and blew him against the wall, tearing off his right leg and opening a scoop-shaped tunnel into his body. There was blood all over him, organs hanging out.... We had seen it too many times not to know that he was gone.