by Mark Helprin
He always rowed slowly on the hidden lake as his reward for reaching it. Eyes stinging with salt, the heat from his body sometimes pulsing so that it felt hotter than sunlight, he turned in his seat to align the bow with the center of the lake’s far end. His oars dropped protectively of his balance and rested on top of the water, but without turning back, he kept looking. Halfway up and in the middle was a commotion of white foam. At first he thought it was a drowning deer thrashing the surface with its antlers, but it was moving forward a great deal faster than a deer could swim. Low to the water, steady, at half the speed of a single shell going at a good clip, it was too small to be a rowboat and had no oars projecting from it. But it was moving and agitating like some sort of mechanism, impossible to identify. He decided to catch up, and began to row hard.
After a minute or two of speed, he turned again to look. Closer to it now, he could see that the object projected alternately from about a foot and a half to about three feet above the water. He still didn’t know what it was or what it could be, and rowed furiously for a hundred strokes, counting them and afraid that he might overtake and collide with it. Having denied his curiosity during the hundred strokes, he turned again. Now he was close enough to see that it was a person, entirely unaware of him, kneeling on some sort of board and paddling violently. Fifty more strokes and he saw that it was a young woman. Twenty-five more and he glided past her. She was so surprised that she almost fell off her board, but then resumed, just as violently and as if to race him.
That, she could not do, and at the end of the lake he dropped his oars, came to a stop, and watched her approach. She straightened up and coasted over the last stretch, drifting to within ten feet of his boat. She was deeply tanned and completely wet, not with water alone but with her own glistening perspiration, breathing hard, visibly relieved to be able to straighten her back after however long she had bent forward to paddle. Never had he seen a woman with a body like hers, and musculature so well and beautifully defined, though not at all like a man’s. He was immediately convinced that this was the way women were born to be, if only because the world offered resistance in all its aspects, and until the very end, opposition to resistance—life—creates strength. She was beautiful in many other ways as well, not least because of the heat that, though she was deeply tanned, made her almost scarlet.
“I’ve never seen anyone here before, anyone,” she said, almost angrily.
“Nor have I,” Harry responded.
She had said it to protect her dignity, because she was wearing only a robin’s-egg-blue, satin brassiere and panties, and they were wet, tight, brief, and, though not entirely transparent, clinging. She did not hunch forward as she might have to minimize the glory of her splendid physique, but remained as straight-backed as her board. To stay balanced on it when its forward momentum had ceased, she had had to straddle it, and thus was he drawn to the two tendons that ran up each inner thigh, creating graceful, rounded channels that were perhaps the most inviting things he had ever seen (though he had seen others before in lesser examples).
Practically naked, in a lake of sapphire-blue, still water, in the high heat of Eden, they were aware of every detail of one another, with hardly anything hidden. Despite the magnificent way she held herself, he was drawn mainly to her face, now framed with partially wet chestnut-colored hair that shone in the overhead sun. She had the self-possession that came from intelligence, and he thought it had to be a great deal of intelligence, as it was a great deal of self-possession.
Still pulsing with heat, they stared at one another until he understood that she was daring him to pretend that he could not look at her forever, and that her near nakedness required of him some sort of polite speech. “Is this a sport I’ve never heard of,” he asked, gesturing toward her board, and her, “or do I have heat stroke?”
She looked down and almost laughed, hiding it with a cough. “No,” she said, “you don’t have heat stroke. In my sophomore year we went to Hawaii for Christmas, and my father shipped this back. Hawaiians ride the waves on them.” Her hair descended in long, accidental curls, and her eyes were blue. He could not stop himself from imagining her in a dress, décolleté, or a sundress and a straw hat. “Forgive me,” he said, smiling, “but I’m dressing you with my eyes, and it’s beautiful.”
“That’s a change, I’ll admit. Do you also read from right to left?”
“Sometimes.” She had no idea of what she had just elicited. “You go really fast on that thing. I think it’s a lot more exercise than rowing.”
“When I go to Hawaii again,” she said, “I want to go out on the waves. They’re so big they can kill you. To maneuver, you have to have speed, know how to turn the board, and place yourself on it. That I can do, and I’ve taken it to Southampton. Atlantic waves break rather than roll, but it’s halfway there.”
“Are you still in college?”
She nodded. “Are you?”
“I’m done. Where?”
“Smith.”
“Senior?”
“In two weeks.”
“And then what?”
“I’m engaged. I’m. . . .”
Pushed below the waves, he managed to bob up. “Would that preclude having lunch in the city?”
“No.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
“You would, or it would be precluded?”
“It would be precluded.”
The sun was too hot, they were too close, and she was too magnificent for him to give up. “Might you be tempted out of preclusion?”
“Oh,” she said, “I would certainly be tempted, pleasingly tempted, tempted so that I will think about it for a day or two, and perhaps even when I’m old, but I’ll resist temptation, which is what you’re supposed to do.”
“Your character must be as strong as your body.”
“Stronger.”
“Can I know who you are, in case you get disengaged?”
“No” was the answer, given kindly.
“Fair enough.”
The sudden infatuation and its definitive end was like being in a kind of car crash, and he didn’t know what to say or how to break off and leave her. “Let’s hope that neither of us,” he finally said, “is arrested.”
“Why would we be?”
“For swimming in the reservoir. You’re soaking wet. The people of New York would be blessed to drink the water you were contained in, but the watershed police might not agree—especially if they’re blind.”
“Have you ever even seen them?” she asked. “Because I haven’t, and we live here.”
“I saw them once, when I was swimming after my row. I ducked underwater and stayed there longer than I thought I could. When I surfaced, their backs were turned. I went under again, and when I came up they were gone.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she said. He knew from the way she said it that it was time for him to row out, so he did. She turned her board around and faced him as he left, observing with sympathy that he could not completely conceal his yearning and loss as he forced himself to pull at the oars.
He reached the gravel bar and glided over it, accelerated by the water issuing from the smaller lake, and soon he was racing in the main stream.
Shaken awake by Johnson, who was drained of energy and so cold he could hardly stand, Harry was still on the lake. After emerging from his coverings, he tried to hold on to the dream as the heat and light began to fade. At first the cold air was refreshing, but as accounts began to square, he shivered. The dog didn’t budge, so he let her lie. Many mornings and other awakenings had been worse. Now he was well enough and rested enough almost to enjoy the freezing mist. “You’re relieved,” he told Johnson, who rushed to get some sleep.
Alternately freezing or warmed by waves of heat that came from within, he thought of patches of the dream as he walked to his post at the edge of the woods. To the left and right, barely visible, were the sentries of other squads, who were looking out over the f
ields and straining to see or hear. At least a dozen squads were emplaced on a line perpendicular to the road, holding a space a hundred yards back from where the trees met the open prairie. Their fields of fire were focused on the road, in a pattern contrived to be a lens that would direct and concentrate the rays of heavy machine-gun fire, rockets, and mortars at an armored counterattack. Every one of these weapons could also slew along the edges of its emplacement to fight the battle the soldiers dreaded most—when German tanks, which could knock down many of the trees and maneuver around the rest, would run wild among them, individually hunting them in all directions, with neither a front nor a rear, as in the clash of medieval armies. In such a fight there was neither strategy nor tactics, and shelter and time disappeared in favor of terror. If only they had armor, they could fight on equal terms with the Tiger and Panther tanks. But that there was temporarily no armor was the reason they were there. Not a single soldier failed to harbor the image of a moving tank, cannon firing, turret swiveling and searching, its body pitching forward as the driver found men to crush in its treads.
Harry knew none of the men to his left and right, but the weight of their common circumstance defined them more than any of their previous distinctions. Only when settled at his post did he fully realize the extent of the artillery barrage all along the line, and the explosions of its shells far forward in the darkness. From miles away, the concussions both at the guns and where the shells burst vibrated pine needles, sometimes clearing them of snow. They shook the diaphragms of the soldiers to the point where it was actually easier to breathe. And they were felt on the skin through heavy clothing. The ground itself was lightly palsied.
But fog and snow were so thick that nothing could be seen. The barrage continued for an hour and a half after four, and then silence rolled up the line from south to north, making the night suddenly so still that the hissing of the snow sounded almost like a steam kettle. Like sentries everywhere, Harry fought to keep his eyes from closing; and, like sentries everywhere, he did not always succeed, and would wake with a start, having for an instant slept standing up. Then he would stomp his feet, take deep breaths, pace up and down, slap himself like a vaudevillian. He hardly felt it, because his cheeks and nose were stiff and numb. He would tap at his face out of curiosity to see which parts didn’t register the announcement, and run his thumb and index finger down the length of his nose, fascinated because it seemed to belong to someone else. Sentries spend the night staring into nothing and shivering deep down. When dawn comes they know it whether in clear skies by the apparent dimming of the stars or, in clouds or mist, by a slight change to gray. Observed in this way, the dawn lasts much longer than its commonly recognized last hour.
When it was light enough to see the bark on the trees, the snow abated as abruptly as had the artillery. Now its hiss was gone, and the mist in front of the infantrymen staring into it was parted by the wind. You cannot see the wind or the air, and yet they’re always there. Like God, air is invisible, and yet you feel its presence when you move through it or as it presses against you when it rises. The wind is a lesson always in play, and it revealed a low ceiling of white and soot-black clouds enameled with orange light that moved along their undersides as if a painter were stroking with an unseen brush. When the mist rolled east and the fields were cleared, the whole eastern sky flickered with orange. Half a dozen burning towns came into view at once. Spaced evenly on the whitened plain according to the dictates of medieval agriculture, they looked like campfires. Pillars of black smoke rose from yellow, flaming bases. The army would soon take these towns. Within or close to them, the Wehrmacht waited to defend or counterattack, their hopes shattered, their anger permanently annealed. When they would fight they would be as steadfast and tragic as the dead. Bullet for bullet, blow for blow, the Americans would meet and roll over them. The soldiers of neither side fought for what propaganda told them, or for principle, or for each other, as is commonly claimed. They fought because they had been set to it, and would hold fast to the impulse of which they were part, which had begun before the beginning of time.
Letting Sussingham sleep into his watch, Harry remained transfixed by the burning towns. Daylight revealed a nation of crows on the snow-covered plain. Thousands were in the sky or on the ground—flying in tightening circles, breaking off to glide down, running to take off, or walking like old people trying to dance. They fell from a white sky as if they had just been created, and their spirals echoed the columns of black smoke beyond them. In cold winters these crows flew west and southwest from Russia, above the armies or lighting among them, neutral and immune. This was the first Harry had seen of them during the war, although in the thirties he saw them in Vienna. There they lit to find warmth and peck in the snow on the banks of the unfrozen Danube after their start on the steppes and their flight over forgotten worlds in Bukovina and Bohemia and on the plains of Hungary.
What he saw ahead of him took Harry out of the orbit of France and to the edges of Eastern Europe. The Russian cold had sent the crows over the lands of bleak weather from which he himself had descended. He understood the language and somehow remembered the climate, the terrain, and how the rivers ran in full but beaten flood. If he closed his eyes, a hundred generations pulled him back as if the sojourn in America had been just a dream. Entranced by fatigue, he found himself in the Pale of Settlement. The powerlessness and peril of fighting through the winter onto the German plains brought him to the gatherings of his faceless ancestors, whose poverty, glory, and humanity were now entwined in fire and smoke swirling like the crows. Because he did not and could not ever know them, a condition to which the English euphemistically referred as the obscurity of one’s origins, he envied for a moment the aristocratic families who had been able to keep records and paintings of preceding generations. But his envy vanished when he thought of how empty of emotion were records of achievement, how unexpressive the portraits—how, despite the brittle gloss that lined the walls of aristocratic houses, in citations of heroism, wealth, or lineage, so little of life was remembered or conveyed.
Instead, those from whom he had descended arose within him—forgotten men, women, and children too poor and oppressed for commemoration. The more exhausted, hopeless, and endangered he became, the more real they seemed, flashing with gold and red as if they were alive. They were so close and real he thought he might touch them. Whence they had come he could not know, but perhaps as he came closer and closer to death he was simply carried forward to them as they waited.
What he saw, imagined, and remembered was the convergence of immortal souls. These were more powerful than armies or empires and more radiant than sunlight. He could not see their faces, because they were swirling like dancers, having risen wildly from the darkness and been shot into the air in spark and flame. If he had been able to rise above the plain and join them, he would have. He stretched out his left hand as if to touch them, as if they would take it and bring him home.
In midmorning it began to snow enough to mute the glow of the fires and swallow up all the smoke. When Sussingham came up to Harry’s position he saw that Harry was breathing sharp, infrequent breaths: the night exhaustion of a sentry in the cold, and hardly unusual. “It’s your turn,” Sussingham said.
“My turn to do what? It’s your turn.”
“Showers and hot food.”
“That’s funny.”
“No, back a few miles they set up a kind of dog-face hotel with hot water. There’s a truck taking one man from each squad every trip. You get an hour and a half before they bring you back.”
“I’ll go last,” Harry said. He was the ranking officer.
“They want whoever was standing guard. That’s the way it works. Go ahead. I’m next after you.”
Not far from the line, COM Z, the supply and logistics command, had made a resort for soldiers on the front, planting a forest of large tents on a sloping field. Trucks were parked everywhere or going back and forth. Smoke poured from cook trailers as
if they were racing locomotives. Harry could smell meat, gravy, and fried potatoes.
When he got off the truck, infantrymen in the line that had formed at the first station offered him a place in front because he was an officer, but he refused it. It was expected that they would offer, and it was hoped that he would decline. They appreciated this, and when officers were as filthy and ragged as they were, and despite their rank had not put themselves ahead, they would follow them wherever necessary. It was the way it was supposed to be.
In the first tent they recorded his name and gave him a towel, a small bar of soap, and a package with five pairs of socks and two sets of underwear. Before the cold had set in and the mud solidified, every soldier in the Seventh Army had been issued one pair of socks per day. No other army in the world had ever been so richly supplied. It was possible to follow the trail of battle by taking note of discarded socks. Some of the less intelligent men, trying to accumulate socks to sell after the war, had trench foot and bulging packs.
After receiving his linens, Harry passed into a gap between the first and second tents, where a furious snow squall made it almost impossible to see someone directly in front of him. Once inside the second tent, he stripped, gave up his old socks and underwear, and gathered his gunnery flannel, pants, shirt, sweater, tunic, and coat into a bundle. Naked for a short time, he went outside and saw many entrances to an immensely long tent. At one of these he was told by a soldier standing just inside, “Take number two, leave your stuff on this side, and close the curtain so water doesn’t get on your clothing and your rifle. Get out your razor.” Harry complied. “Not everyone brings one. When you pull the chain, the water’ll run for eight minutes. After that it stops and you get out. Did you see the boilers?”
