by Mark Helprin
Leaving Gibson, they skirted the wide river and crossed a road on which thousands of cattle were backed up for miles; in the distance they were as even a brown as the drovers’ felt hats. For scores of miles the landscape was the same, a rolling plain which looked like masses of brown whales, dotted flowers, banks of lilies, and grasses. The trains exact and faithful forward motion led her to expect something ahead at all moments, and although there was nothing save the glittering May landscape, the convincing direction became in itself more than enough to hold her, and hold her it did, as had her realization of the night power in and around Gibson. She was held fast, but no more than anyone on the train, no more than farmers, fencemen, or drovers outside who were passed by and left to work amid their own silence and claimed lands, no more than boys in Gibson who prodded cattle with dry white cotton-willow sticks, or distant horsemen on a ridge, galloping only to disappear, although leaving the surety of their gallop impressed upon the passengers. A detachment of pony soldiers, ’75 blue, rode two by two on a wagon track, swords and buckles shining. They did not always know what they did, but by God they did it, as it was inevitable. Had she not lived her life in grayness and seen the bright only by fantasy? Did she not as the daughter of a man deserve these rich lands which had been declared ready and were being gathered in the arms of those who had come from such long ways away? Yellow Sky was in the mountains, up high, beyond the timberline which was like a skirt. The air was as thin as shell and pearl bright as the lakes and plummeting black-rock streams. She would stop in Yellow Sky but others would pass right on, and yet others right down to the broken beaches of the Pacific. This young impressionable girl alone on the cool wicker-weave seat of a shady railroad car moving out West could not be stopped. The colors in her were bound for Yellow Sky.
At about six in the morning the tired train halted in a cool saddle of the mountains just above the treeline. Men began to carry wood from enormous stockpiles along the track and load it on the coaler. A wooden trough was lowered from a cable-bound barrel tank and mountain water fell into the blackened holds of the locomotive, dribbling, spraying, and steaming from valves of nickel and steel, hissing like a swarm of locusts in the convoluted boilers. The steam from the locomotives gaskets mingled with the early morning mist, low clouds which hid white gold-flecked mountains of sunrise. The peaks had begun to shine many hours before, and after sunset they would shine even though the night was black, the price for this advanced and delayed burnishing of the mountains being shade and darkness at the extreme hours. Those who lived in that place stared each day in special communication at the shining crowns all about them. The man who had charge of the railroad depot was tall and wore hobnailed boots which awakened passengers as he walked on top of the cars. His boots also awakened his children, a little bear-faced boy and two fat little girls happy to have only their own thousands of private jokes.
The one hundred or so people in the town were miners, bridge workers, and railroad men who rode small mounted donkey engines up and down the passes securing faulted track and removing obstructions. There were always bridges to build, sometimes of several yards, sometimes of a quarter of a mile, because it was ravine country, rocky, high, indifferent to smooth-trafficking men and natural only to birds such as eagles, hawks, crows, and falcons—mountain birds with eyes of wondrous and staggering capabilities. Sharp as a ten-foot glass, they still could not see veins of silver spread variously throughout the ravines and deep into rock where only men could go, and by great effort. The trackers held the land down by use of iron bands, the bridgemen smoothed it, and the miners pierced it—as if they were hunters and it a mammoth, succumbing to their studied attack.
The attack was not studied but passionate, and not of greed alone. At each day’s end the bridgemen, the railroadmen, the miners looked at the land in the quiet time when the mountains shone softly like lanterns into the dark valley, and they saw that it was not damaged. Work as they did, the peaks were high, the streams excellently fresh, the pastures rich, their iron and wood, their fences and track all but invisible due to the greatness of the land. This, as much as anything else, made them love it. It was invincible and so beckoned, challenging them to make their mark. Impossible, they said when they looked up, for the sky was as blue as a pure packet of indigo, and it reached into deep unconquerable heaven.
The conductor (who had warned Katherine to be careful of sparks—prompting her to say that it was impossible to be careful of sparks) roused her from a fitful, watery-eyed, straight-backed, sitting-up, night never ends sleep and she with the rest of the passengers stepped into a mountain village where they were served tea and rolls. Katherine stood quietly at yet another window, this in the depot, and she saw in the distance the lantern mountains glowing gold in all directions, catching the future sun. There, and just then did she realize, was the source of the power she had sensed days before. This time it was realization which struck her, not revelation, and there were no tears or risings within. She simply realized in the deadest and most sober of moments that in those mountains was the source, glancing off high lighted rock faces where no man could ever go, split into rivers eastward and westward running in little fingers to every part of the land, to the oceans where it blended with the newly turned sea foam and sun.
As the sun became stronger, but still not visible, they'reembarked onto the train. When Katherine approached the three-stepped iron stand, the conductor offered her his hand. She wondered why, thinking that perhaps he was going to help her up, something he did not do. But he shook her hand, and barred her way. Why? she said, and then he pointed to her luggage—leather cases and white canvas duffels—and when she still did not understand, to the mountains with golden light like the warm light from a candle. She was struck dumb. The train began to pull away, conductor and all, with a vast exhalation of white steam, and he said to the stunned girl what she already knew, “This is Yellow Sky.” As the train vanished she could think only of her father, her mother, and the gray oceans in between. Oceans in between, their lights had lasted, and she had found her way. It came in a flood, and she shuddered. Oceans in between. It was an end. It was a beginning. Katherine had come to Yellow Sky.
ELISHA HOSPITAL
THEY ARE building a new wing, but nevertheless it is quiet. On instructions from the contractor the men work slowly, almost silently. With each board or frame it is as if a decision must be made: shall we tighten this, or shall we let it rest? The old men with shirts wrapped around their heads inevitably continue, although one has the impression that perhaps someday they simply will not work and instead lean on their trowels or sit on the sacks of concrete. At the rate they work, it is hard to tell if they are building or tearing down.
It is the same with us, I suppose, when we treat a dying patient. Like the old Iraqi Jews who pour the cement, we, too, must decide whether or not to tighten our patients dying frame or just to let it dissolve and run away on the light blue air.
Blue is the predominant color at Elisha. It is seen everywhere out the big windows, from their tops to their bottoms, because we are on the summit of a hill—better to say mountain, although I hesitate to call anything a mountain unless it is capped with snow. Most windows look north; the ease of the light is inescapable; a soft clear altitude of blue air flees from all sides. Ships at sea, like small precision engines enameled in red and orange and black, move across a glass of blue. Passengers in a German dirigible would have had it no better than patients here. It is true they could move from place to place, but at Elisha we have no vibration—not even from the construction. Except for the souls that die within, it is a perfect environment.
It is in this hospital that I met my wife. On chill November evenings we made tea in the laboratory, which overlooks the Hadar; the bright orange flame of a Bunsen burner and the tea in a glass beaker made the dark cold and hissing respiratory winds outside less terrible. I remember well staring at a large desk calendar underneath a fluorescent light, trying to fix the time and feelin
g permanently I did. It was November 15, 1965, and it was ten o’clock. As I have said, the wind was whistling outside and it was dark and we were in love. And the clear light and sounds nearly matched our excitement. We spoke of Switzerland, and California, and Paris, and we have been to those places and we have been back.
We had then grave aspirations, as doctors might. We have achieved some of them, others have been whittled away by the world. We have not been bent by great events so that we are something other than ourselves, with an enemy within. On the contrary, we have been lucky. I have been in war but not in the thick of it. I have been in upheaval but not in the thick of it. I have never been concerned with governments, one way or another, because one way or another they have never been much concerned with me.
THE FIRST of this September marked the opening of school. Even I shared the excitement of the new year. As I walked to the hospital I passed a high school, the courtyard of which was jammed with noisy foolish students from whom—contrary to the popular assumption—one should not learn but rather take revival. A beautiful young girl reminded me of my wife and of the autumn when we met. The trees were rustling and it was cool in the shade, and I left as she was blushing because I had stared intently.
I was in a good mood; it was my day in the month solely for the medical library, and there is no better work than to sit there and read. But on my way upstairs I wanted to stop in at X-ray, so I began walking down the corridor, where windows of bright blue are one wall and silver doors and yellow benches are the other. Outside the operating rooms was a young man of about twenty-five and his girl child. He was tall and slim, with dark hair and very dark skin. Not strangely—it was, after all, at Elisha above the sea and hills—he was wearing a bright and fine blue shirt. His daughter, a child like many I have seen, was tiny and beautiful. She had grown out of infancy, but one had to look twice to make certain. Like her father she had dark hair and dark skin. I judged that they had been at the beach in August, for she was almost a chocolate color, the whites of her eyes and the loose white gown in which she was enwrapped contrasting to make a luminescence.
I remembered this child. I had heard that she was very sick and did not have much chance to live. I had not given it thought. It would be too hard to give thought to such things all the time. She had received anesthesia and was busy losing consciousness, perhaps for the last time, while her father held her in his arms, rocked her, put her little head next to his face, and gathered in her legs. He was worried that perhaps the anesthesia was not working, and as I was passing he looked at me.
“She is falling asleep?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I can see that it won’t be long.” I put my hands in my pockets and stood as if to talk, for there was no one else there and I was almost sure of the outcome. He held her very closely—I have never seen a man as tender with a child—until she was fast asleep and a gowned and masked operating-room nurse came through swinging doors to take the child and carry her within.
Nothing could be said, so I said, “You are a new immigrant?” since it was evident from his speech.
“Yes,” he said.
“From where?” although that was also evident.
“From Russia—Kiev,” he replied, a little more at ease. “I was to be a curator of arts at the museum, and then...” He raised his arms and smiled. “And then...”
“And what do you do here?”
“I work as an artist commercial, but soon I am going to study at the university, when my wife comes. She is still in Kiev.”
I was reluctant to leave him alone. At such times quiet institutions are murderous, but I had to do my reading. “Look,” I said, “these things can be difficult. If there is anything I can do to help, anything at all for whatever reason ... If you need something, or just to talk—you know? I will be in the library, upstairs,” and I pointed. I touched him on the shoulder and left quickly.
I spent that day in the library. Later in the evening when it was dark, I walked bleary-eyed past the empty yellow bench where he had been sitting. His lighter and cigarettes were there. I dared not learn the outcome. A warm light met the dark blue of the windows, then almost black, and I left Elisha Hospital, thinking of my wife and sons and how history had left me in peace. A dark September rain began to fall, as one seldom sees it fall in Haifa.
END OF THE LINE
IN SICILY one always finds precedent. The barber cuts hair according to precedent, flies land according to custom, a route is taken because it was taken before, and although a certain crop is unprofitable it may be cultivated for years on end simply because of tradition.
For example, in the town of Nuovo Fantasio, pronounced in the old way with the stress upon the “i,” there is a date orchard belonging to the family Della Mercedi. It is an old, high orchard with thick trees nearly seventy-five feet before the crown. It is a square with ninety trees to a side, but only eight thousand all together, because in the center is a luxurious shaded garden built at the sacrifice of one-hundred trees, intimate, for it is a Roman square of ten trees on each side, and enormous for the very fact that it displaces one-hundred massive trunks. This orchard was planted by a Caliph who genuinely believed Sicily to be an outcropping of North Africa. For a thousand years the trees grew, died, and left a stream of child trees providing an income of heavy dates for many families of Muslims, Spanish, Normans, and lastly the Della Mercedi, who followed their line somehow back to Spain but could not be sure.
The orchard was not fertile, and had not been for quite some time. At the tops of date palms are long sharp spears, modified leaves which have become weapons against the birds in a million generations of fighting and steadfastness while the swordlike greenery rolled itself into spikes. All good things come from a struggle, even the simple fruit of a date palm, from a struggle of planting, growing, and staying. A tree will only be fertile if much labor is expended in making it so, and for years there had not been enough labor in Sicily, at least not there. More than half the people had left for America, and after the war for northern Europe, where they worked in factories and sent home money to those who remained. The government built a textile mill and opened a new cut in the marble quarry, so that whatever laborers there were had much better work to do than climbing high ladders which came to narrow points so they could be positioned around the spikes, so that the fruit could be reached and regenerated.
Some of the fruit had by chance blackened into ripeness but most was red and unfertile, a terra-cotta color which seemed to satirically reflect the suns afternoon blazing. There were so many crows with no one to chase them away by day that the noise from their wings was like an express train or the Sirocco. The earth was sulfurous, or at least smelled so, and the mountains were a pale yellow and white.
When the sun set, a special patina of silver and green traced itself across the orchard, in between the tall thorn-tressed trees. The roof of the sky, having been white hot, cooled, enabling the crows to ride upward on rivers of yellowed and cold sea air.
Signora Della Mercedi, and her son Paolo, were the two Della Mercedi left to claim the land. Her husband had died long before, so that she had forgotten even what it was like to wear anything but black. A son, her best son, had been killed in the war. His name was Giorgio, the father’s hope, for he was strong and manly even when a boy. There was one other son, Thomaso, a wretch, a gourmand who lived, or rather ate, in Rome. He spent, borrowed, gambled, and ate. He had control of the revenues from the land, what revenues there were, an unfortunate accident due to the fact that he was the eldest surviving son and his mother had never been taught to read. Paolo was confined to a wheelchair, and spent his time listening to a giant German short-wave set bequeathed to him by his father. At least he was not like his brother Thomaso, who, to his mother’s complete incredulity, loved only men.
There were so many problems now for Signora Della Mercedi as she approached her old age. Government people came from Palermo to demand taxes which had not been paid. The house was
in terrible disrepair. Servants (there were two, always changing) would go to the town with enough money for some meat, some cheese, and bread, and come back with bread, which became that night’s dinner. She was silent, for she did not really care what she ate. The problems were like crows, cowardly and unimportant when alone, but bold and terrible in their thousands.
Once her husband had taken her into the date orchard in the evening. They were young, their children still infants, and the trees producing like factories. He was a big man who ate mainly meat, whiskey, and pastry, and he was a rich man who liked to gamble and have expensive things like German radios and a Bugatti motor car. He screamed suddenly with great power, “Zapata!”, and the noise of ten thousand wings rose skyward from the thick dark palms, making her leap into his arms for she was truly frightened.
He was an aristocrat, a baron of lands which had been his whole life and his father’s life too. When he was a small child he had looked up at the tall trees and seen men high in the air working at the fertilization. There were no more real titles, and there would not have been for the Della Mercedi anyway, but there could still be men like her husband, men with a singularity of purpose refined as in a fire. She thought that there must be always true aristocrats in fact and privilege, so that everyone might enjoy the pretense—for everyone does. The baron had been a kind man, expert in plant genetics, fond of Cezanne (having several reproductions), and above all, committed to staying in Sicily even though all his brothers and so many others had left. Why? He didn’t know, but to stay against all odds was dramatic and noble, the real source of his nobility, his fight.
