A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "A huge Ah! came from the soldiers—I myself said it—when we realized that she was singing the 'Addio del passato' from La Traviata, a song about a woman who looks back upon a past that has vanished, and begs God for His mercy.

  "She sang beautifully, or perhaps she didn't, but it was the most beautiful singing I had ever heard. She looked out upon us, and I think that she, too, was moved. Then it began to rain. We could hear the wind and the rain on the roof high above, and occasional thunder, like artillery, echoing among the hills of Lucca.

  "In the storm, her singing grew more and more beautiful. At every second repetition, a company would leave, and another would come in from the outside. Those who had been standing in the rain were so cold that they trembled. The ones who left had an air of hopelessness. It touched her. It must have.

  "And then she had to rest, and they brought out a tenor, who sang the 'Parigi.' That was inimitably beautiful, and we, who were as hard as rock and inured to simulations of despair, sat in the darkness and cried. The two singers knew that many of us would soon be killed, and their singing came from the heart. I still hear it. I can summon it. I still hear the rain on the roof. Oh, at times you could hardly hear the rain, but it was there."

  "Signore," Nicolò said. "Before I go, if I go..."

  "In a great aria," Alessandro went on, as if he had not heard Nicolò, and perhaps he had not, "purity and perfection of form are joined to the commanding frailty of a human soul, and when those elements are knit, an arresting battle follows. Once, on the Cima Rossa, I saw an eagle dive at great speed into a group of birds that had been circling around the mountain. The eagle was in command of the forces that can put you in thrall enough for you to forget and relinquish life; the birds were the life that, despite its weakness and vulnerability, or perhaps because of it, rose above the perfections arrayed against it. Watching the eagle destroy the pack of birds, I hardly breathed. To one who lived with violence and death, it was especially poignant to see them assailed, but I had the sense that the meaning of it did not stop there, that of this battle something would come other than suffering. I still suspect it, I still sense it, I still want it, and still I have not seen it. But, think, if darkness did not exist, how would you know light? You wouldn't."

  "Your son," Nicolò interrupted.

  Alessandro drew himself up and tilted his head back so as to see a sky that was now too full of early morning light to be blue. Then he dropped his head upon his bent fingers and bent wrist, and pressed his forehead so hard that it whitened. His slow and deliberate breathing sounded like the contented breathing of deep sleep.

  He opened his left eye, just his left eye, and looked at Nicolò askance. He lifted his head. The white mark began to redden to the color of the red ring around it. For the first time that Nicolò could remember, Alessandro looked bitter, twisted, and angry.

  "My son was killed in Libya in nineteen forty-two," Alessandro said, "when he was twenty-three years of age."

  "How was he killed?"

  "I don't know. He was a machine-gunner, and at first he was listed as missing. In view of my own experiences and the conduct of the war, I knew that he might have been captured.

  "The British tore our divisions to pieces. Had it not been for the Afrika Korps it would have been over very quickly, but with the Germans stiffening us we had the opportunity to lose many more men. The Germans kill and die for principles of order. To them, these have more force and appeal than life itself. Such frenzies completely puzzle us, and we don't know what to do when faced with them. It was in the desert, in nineteen forty-two, and I don't know how he was killed.

  "We didn't admit that he was dead, until several years after the war, when all the prisoners had come home: even those, the ones with the whitened lips, from Russia. We didn't admit it until we went to the battlefield itself. A British officer took us through the mines. He said that no one was recognizable, and that we would find only bones that had been picked clean and scattered in fights between vultures and dogs. We said we wanted to go anyway. We wanted to see. He had been our only child.

  "Anyone who might have seen what had happened to Paolo had most likely been killed himself, and the men in his company—they moved across the sand in companies—who were left to tell the tale of the battle in which he was killed, hadn't been anywhere near him.

  "The battlefield was what you would expect: sand, metal, and bones. They brought the bones home, eventually, and buried them all together. We had touched some, in looking for identification tags. Ariane held her fingers to her breast for days thereafter, thinking that she might have touched our son. On the way in, the half-track in which we were riding drove over something that a few years before had been a man. The officer was kind: he apologized again and again, and we passed across the rocky ground without even blinking. All the time, I was unable to rid myself of the thought that this was the last place my son had ever seen, and, because the battle had been at night, the passionless landscape, with nothing soft, and nothing green, had been lit only by flashes and reflections in the smoke. I was familiar with the sounds and patterns of light that he had seen, and so was Ariane, even if only from a distance.

  "She and I understood after the First War, certainly, that life is a series of intervals, each complected differently. We had known that our happiness would end, but we had not thought that it would be totally destroyed, as if in vengeance."

  "Was he drafted, or did he volunteer?" Nicolò asked, for he was approaching military age himself.

  "He was called up. As early as thirty-seven I wanted him to go to America and stay with Luciana, and he almost did. We had a hundred arguments that lasted half the night. I marshaled everything I knew, but though he had little from direct experience, he could argue as well as I could, or better, and in the end I was unable to convince him. I could not adequately convert the arguments of experience into arguments of principle, and he, lacking experience, didn't understand the only language with which I could have convinced him. Besides, he knew about me. I had tried, as every sensible father does, to keep these things from him, but he found out by indirection. He had my example to follow, and my example consistently undercut my words.

  "I had thought that, despite everything else, I had at least survived the war, but I hadn't. Death was in me, like a seed, and after a time it blossomed even more cruelly than for Guariglia.

  "I remember the arguments. I sat down. He paced. He wouldn't tire even at two in the morning. He gesticulated with his hands, and spoke brilliantly. He was an anti-fascist, and he thought he would have less authority and appeal after the war, no matter what the outcome, had he not suffered through it with the rest of his generation. He was right, of course, but I maintained that the risk wasn't worth it. He maintained that it was. All life is risk, he said, and how could I argue with that except to impeach the word all?

  "I told him, one by one, of those I knew who had taken the risk and lost. I was very specific, as I have been with you, and it moved him. He was a good boy, selfless and idealistic, as one is at that age. He was so touched by what I told him that, goddamn it, he wanted to honor them by putting himself in the same place, by sharing their risk and, should it come to him, their fate. And he did.

  "I loved him from the first moment I saw him, at the edge of the fountain in the Villa Borghese, to the last, when we embraced at the door, and he turned to walk down the street, a duffle bag carried effortlessly on his shoulder. I know he wanted me to think he was carrying it effortlessly. I had done exactly the same for my own father.

  "But there was a difference. Before he crossed over to North Africa he discovered that his wife was pregnant. Had he been able to attend the birth of his child, to spend a few days holding her, caring for her, he would not have gone had the choice been his. All his idealism would have withered in the face of the baby's raw cry, but he didn't know...."

  Alessandro turned to Nicolò. "Which do you think I prefer, to live and keep all these memories alive, even though they're
a poor substitute for life itself, or to die and chance that perhaps, in some way that I cannot fathom, by some miracle, unlikely though it may be, I'll join them?"

  "To live," Nicolò said. He had once sold things on the street, and he could weigh a simple proposition.

  "I've agreed during all these years, for that is precisely what I've done, but with death on its way, even if not today, or tomorrow, or this year, the choice is not really mine, and I'm awakening to the fact that I may not have chosen well. Perhaps my judgment is too much clouded by fear and too little enlivened by faith and trust.

  "All my life I've seen life and death in alternation, with one springing up after the other, and both arising when you least expect them. If no reason exists to believe that life will assert itself after death, how can you explain its original and inexplicable assertion?"

  "Me?"

  "Yes, you. You came to life. It was no more logical or explicable than if, after you die, you find yet another surprise that is illogical and inexplicable."

  "You think so?" Nicolò asked, hoping that

  Alessandro was actually figuring it out, and would be able to answer his own question right in front of him, right there, for, after all, Alessandro was old, and Nicolò thought he could see over the rim.

  "I don't know, but I think it is appropriate for me to decide how to die: not to take control that I will immediately relinquish, but to unify my life, to give it an artful shape, to affirm at the last that everything is not merely haphazard, to honor what I believe, and, perhaps for one last time, even should it mean nothing, to express my love.

  "Nicolò, as much as I have enjoyed walking with you on the road to Monte Prato, as much as your vitality bled into me and rattled awake the part of my soul that was going to sleep, that is something I can do only alone. I'm tired, and the sun is rising."

  "YOU WANT me to leave?" Nicolò asked.

  Alessandro slowly shook his head from side to side.

  "Then I'll stay."

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Alessandro smiled.

  "All right, I'll leave," Nicolò said. He didn't want to leave, not so much because he thought that Alessandro might need him, but rather because he could not imagine that he would be happy on the road by himself, apart not merely from the old man but from the old man's story, although that he could carry with him. Nonetheless, he wanted it to continue. Though he knew that before he understood Alessandro's life he would have to live much more of his own, he knew as well that Alessandro had done something marvelous: he had kept his love alive despite everything that had happened, and this was something from which Nicolò did not want to tear himself away.

  He imagined himself back on the road, retracing some of their steps and then veering off on his own. Though it would be in the heat of the day, it would be cold and quiet. "What will happen?" he asked.

  "To whom?"

  "To you. To me."

  "That's simple," Alessandro said. "I'll die and you'll grow up. You aren't deterred by anything I've told you, are you?"

  "No."

  "I thought not. You undoubtedly long for the pain of the world with the same intensity that you desire to love a woman."

  Nicolò made a gesture of pleasurable agreement. It was true.

  "As it unfolds, you may not be so unambivalent, but you're right to want it with a passion. If you didn't now, you'd never last through it."

  "I don't quite understand," Nicolò said.

  "You will. I think you're awakening as much as I am. I think that when you made up your mind to catch the bus, even though it wanted to leave you behind, you lit a number of fuses that are sparkling on their way."

  "Signore, this may seem funny, but I want to do something for all the people in the time of which you spoke. I want to very much, but I can't, can I."

  "But you can. It's simple. You can do something just, and that is to remember them. Remember them. To think of them in their flesh, not as abstractions. To make no generalizations of war or peace that override their souls. To draw no lessons of history on their behalf. Their history is over. Remember them, just remember them—in their millions—for they were not history, they were only men, women, and children. Recall them, if you can, with affection, and recall them, if you can, with love. That is all you need to do in regard to them, and all they ask."

  As Nicolò gathered his few things in preparation for leaving, he was overcome by emotion. Even at his age, working in the propeller factory, now and then, he cried, and his father took him in his arms, like a little boy. He was surprised by how quickly it happened, and how natural it seemed, and that his father was always inexplicably grateful when it did happen. So he was unable, though he tried, to avoid it. He held back his tears as long as he could, and then, when he could no longer, he no longer did.

  Alessandro looked at him with understanding. "Nicolò," he said. "You're a good boy, you're a very good boy. I would like to take you in my arms the way I used to hold my son, but I can't. That's for your father to do. And, as for me, it's something that I knew, many years ago, I could never do again."

  "I understand, Signore. I understand," Nicolò said, drawing his hand across his face, slowly recovering, until he stood up, and breathed a sigh in relief, and cleared his throat. The storm that had passed over him was very quick, and now he felt calm.

  "Is it that I just leave you here?" he asked.

  "Don't worry about me,"

  Alessandro told him. "Don't worry."

  "All right," Nicolò answered, swinging up Alessandro's briefcase by its straps.

  "That's mine, but you can have it if you want."

  Nicolò said, "I forgot," and put it down.

  Alessandro struggled to rise.

  "Don't get up, don't get up," Nicolò said.

  "It's all right," Alessandro told him. "I'm going to leave this place and start down the hill, where there's more sun." He rose with great difficulty, and then he stood, swaying back and forth just enough for Nicolò to see.

  Nicolò stepped toward him, and they embraced. "Don't lose your way," Alessandro said.

  WHAT REMAINED to him was the simplest thing in the world. Though he struggled at every step as he pushed through the brush to the open, Alessandro felt a wave of contentment, for at last he was approaching the gate about which he had wondered and speculated all his life, and what had once been speculation was becoming, miraculously, an aria, and he was buoyed by resonant singing. He assumed that it had come purely from memory, and he was shaken by the fullness and clarity of the sound. He had always found in singing a momentary escape from the burdens of mortality, and now he was not surprised, as he prepared to rise or fall, perhaps to be gathered in upon streams of sparkling velocity, to hear intersecting voices so lilting, resonant, and beautiful that upon them all the difficult past was effortlessly lifted like a boat in a lock.

  Even were it not the simple and beautiful song he had wished for all his life, it was beautiful, and to this music he pushed through the pine and laurel, breaking so many dry branches that he sounded like a fire crackling in the brush. A man who had once risen thousands of meters on vertical cliffs as smooth as building-stone struggled to descend on ledges and steps no higher than his knee. The air was filled with the scent of the fragrant leaves and needles that he crushed: the fumes rose and fell in currents that swept over the hillside in many confusing directions.

  When Alessandro broke into the clear, he was breathing as if he had been in a race, and his breathing went perfectly well with the little explosions he felt in his heart, the not entirely unpleasant soft and hollow pounding, and the astonishing moments, followed by an ecstatic weightless feeling, when the heart seemed actually to have stopped.

  Holding his cane by the middle and the top, like a canoe paddle, he sat down. His fingers were blanched because he was not getting enough oxygen, but he hardly needed to look at his fingers to know that this was so. He was so weary that things came, thoughts arose, and images appeared, in to
rrents, in whirlwinds that tore the air of memory as if it were the rattling foliage on the hillside. And he thought, let me rest a moment from my dying, so that I may see where I am.

  He was on a hillside. It was as simple as that. He might find himself there at evening, rested and still alive, waving his cane to get the attention of a farmer who would help him back to the road. And it was possible, too, that his heart would recover and he would be able to continue on down the hill, and back up again.

  Once, in the Alto Adige, he had descended into the Valley of the Talvera, dropping in less than half a day from the high snow-covered ridges to the banks of the river itself, which, though it ran cold from the glacial streams that poured into it, ran through a sward of dense greenery that might have clutched the banks of the River Po. The heat had made the soldiers strip off their jackets and wool shirts, and they sweated under their packs as if it had been summer. The sun shone, the road was dusty, and they went down on the palms of their hands on flat boulders in ice-cold water and drank from the river. On the hillside in the Apennines, Alessandro remembered the sound of their rifles clattering against the rock, and the sound of the river rushing by as if it were falling without friction into an abyss. The only thing that could be heard as it decompressed over the edge was a hiss.

  In the Valley of the Talvera, ruined stone houses and overgrown gardens were the refuge of men and women who looked at the passing soldiers with hollow eyes. Here the sun shone only at midday. Hardly anyone ever came, for the bridges were far away, and to descend to the riverside at this point it was necessary to break through brush that had grown freely since the beginning of time. Who were they, then? They seemed to have had no language. The men were haggard, unshaven, and hungry. They made the soldiers nervous about passing through, for the soldiers shined their boots, polished their buckles, and washed their faces in the snow, which was all part of keeping oneself proud and keeping oneself alive.