A Dove of the East: And Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  Things went on in Rome about which she had heard and not even vaguely comprehended. She could see from the shrine on top of the mountain where she went in summer in July on the Feast of St. Ann tremendous long ships which passed into and out of sight within minutes. She knew the world was changing, but all of its motion was just beyond the horizon, something to be seen with a sideways glance. And therefore she had decided to stay on her lands, though they might be impoverished and dry, though the government might appropriate them year by year decree by decree as was done when taxes went unpaid, though her sons did not have and would not have sons of their own.

  Without fail, she went every evening at dusk to the Roman Garden, which had become choked with weeds and grass, where her husband had yelled “Zapata!” forty years before. She would bring with her a stick. After coming up the small hill she stood breathless in the half light, unafraid and alone, and thought of her husband and his wish not to leave the land. She had no grandsons, and that was bitter fruit, but as if to ward off the crows circling above she said, “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art Thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

  And then she banged the thick trunk of a palm, yelling “Zapata! Zapata!,” with her eyes fiercely staring at the black cloud of birds fleeing upwards.

  THE LEGITIMACY OF MEDIUM BEAUTY

  IN BEGINNING autumn there is a wind which comes on high clear days and grips the trees, drawing them out and shaking them beyond several of their breaths, while their leaves rattle like a wind in themselves and seem like jewels or green water. These winds are chainwinds, never ceasing, and on those days they scourge all the land and water with peace and clarity and sun and coolness. In Atlanta they had come only in the late fall and sometimes in the summer when the heat broke and the clearness seemed to be shimmering in itself. But here south of San Francisco, in mountains where there are redwoods and low high altitudes and abandoned cabins abandoned only recently but never so, and always with damp dark floorboards and a mattress wet on its springs when you enter into the darkness from the dark black stream and its numb moving waters, and the brown pine needles and black pieces of earth that stick on the feet when you step carefully on the porch—here that jeweled chain of air moved way up in the tops of trees, far above the gloom of rays and roots and fallen trees. And when she looked up at the blue through the red wood she saw the clouds moving like ghosts and their horses, making the upper branches shudder and hiss. She often wandered here, and to the south in the valley, and evening found her driving back into San Francisco, ruddy and sad but not sad enough to be unhappy.

  She was Mary from Atlanta, who thought in wide circles about porches and the past and small towns in summer—facts and memories of detail which transfixed her at the wheel of her open car and made her arms shake and her back cold, although these things were not remarkable, and neither was her life. Neither was her life, a life of love although she did not know for what, unless it was for small pictures which occurred to her or which she saw in quiet moments alone staring at the whiteness of the castled city or across the Bay to reddened mountains and leonine hills with yellowed brush tumbling from their sides.

  The phone was green, the windows wide, the floor waxed and yellowed wood, her dress a print by Marimekko, liquor on a glass cart, cuttingboards in the kitchen, twelve bottles of wine, much Lucite such as blocks with photographs embedded and an end table, a bed high enough off the floor to kill, an old dresser, high rent, magazines and a bookshelf full of women novels which cannot ever be read again because they are gossip, dependent on plot and sequence rather than the static truth, many memories of men, in the beginning at least, who had stayed but none to let her in. All seemed too eager or too serious, too capable, or too hard. Perhaps it was because she herself put them off by speaking hard and being skeptical, as if she assumed they had no memories and could think and act only like modern furniture. And then the liquor would start to flow. Liquor is magic for furniture, but afterwards she could think only of getting them out and jumping into the bath. One morning an especially timid one tiptoed into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice over ice. While reading her copy of that months Vogue he was startled so by ice shifting in the glass that he jumped back, knocking himself unconscious against a wall. Once there was one so large and dumb that he drew himself a tub of water, stepped in, and displaced it. One was an accountant, one a lobster executive, and one an actor who stood naked.

  But furniture, no matter how droll, was furniture, if she could be carried at a mite’s breath to a childhood carnival, the American Legion, hardened women at shooting galleries, soldiers and their wives with angular eyes and almond glasses, late night heat and flashing lights at the gray cotton sky, and the screen door during a carried half sleep shutting until another day and mirages on the sand-colored roads.

  Now she was large—not fat, but big-boned with an upturned nose and pores that could be seen too well in the magnifying mirror. She looked like her mother, whom she had never thought pretty, but it seemed unnecessary for her mother to be that way when the little girl Mary had a face which was small and smooth as a chestnut and could be clasped in her father’s hand in riotous fun.

  That little fine face was now large, and she imagined that her head alone weighed as much as the little girl she once was. But she was quick enough not to be bound to that, and she was not. It was something, just something. No special state or time or thought but only the occasional gripped her sense of herself.

  San Francisco has hills. She lived clean on one of them, and enjoyed good climate. She was lovely but all around her would suffice. She was lovely but she found herself growing out of it, and getting older to where she would have to find for herself a sustaining power. Her dreams were dead, memories not enough, she felt nought for God, and she had no passion. But a deep and beautiful sadness reigned, so that San Francisco moved slowly like a swan, and she drew from everything she saw enough to make her life a deep cool color, a medium beauty, that full wind which made the trees shudder, and draw breath, and seem like green water.

  THE HOME FRONT

  BEFORE THE Battle of the Wood could get itself going, most of early June had passed. Originally headquarters had intended the confrontation to begin on 1 June exactly. But messages between commanders had been late in coming, and supplies were delayed on the way to the front. This was because the messengers and mule drivers, farm boys, took their time in crossing the countryside of new summer. Often an entire supply train—a hundred, perhaps two or three hundred caissons—would pull off the road onto the green so drivers and guards could swim in the clean, swirling waters of a little river. Messengers dangled along the ridges walking their horses, passing slowly through the leafy fringe and perfect climate. There was no galloping along the white roads. Obsessions about buttoning brass buttons had passed, all the young men in the army were red and tanned the beautiful color of summer’s first sun, and it seemed to each man that his haircut was perfect and his clothes in perfect press. There was a blaze then, but for the cool evenings, and the army moving in great thin lines through the rich green from one place to another was like a fresh blue wake.

  Of the many soldiers from Maclean, Virginia, was one who came to be known as Jack, and then for some reason as either Jack Japan or The Glass. In Virginia in this time of summer he had often walked along the stagnant curve of the river to the war cemetery where he lay in quiet among white flags and lilies. But he had not been nearly as alive as he was now before the Battle of the Wood, seemingly all-seeing and as excited as the thrushing of the overhead branches. Beginning summer was always good, but never had he felt so well his life and its every moment: riding in a truck with two rows of fellow soldiers, walking to the river and just standing there watching, mounting a horse and seeing the saddle close up as his body bent like a complex machine designed to make quick curves, being in the shade, eati
ng in the afternoon when it was cooler, just arising and facing everything. They all knew they were on the eve of a large offensive. There had been a fine peace for too long. When summer burst it seemed only to verify great change. They were afraid. Carrion had survived the fall because it had been cold and dry, and then the winter, and then spring. Where the animal had settled, a paste of mud and dust had shielded it, and the cold evenings helped, too. But by June carrion infected the woods and the sides of the roads. The countryside was thick in places with the natural smell of death, just the death of squirrels and other small hunted animals, but it was enough to signal the men of a waiting army.

  Orders came at intervals, so that Jack spent his time marching into the stream of other columns and making many new camps, one more beautiful than another. Then one day an order came by way of a messenger with a dark face and black saber-mustache. This man was no boy, and it appeared, from his bearing and the way he thrived on a quick gallop and the sight of the road before him and from his black belts crossing the spring coat of the uniform, that he was part of a real war and not just the uneasy dream before a true shattering battle. He had passed through the camp smiling, carrying in his hand a white paper requesting of the commander half a hundred men with shovels and full packs to be on burial detail for one-quarter of one unimportant flank. Burial detail struck the half a hundred as providential and yet very unlucky. Unless there were a breakthrough by enemy cavalry and long and terrible sweeps, they would be safe. The job was not good and there was no chance of seeing the battle and surviving it so that they might have the particular elation which comes from getting through and the privilege of saying to women that they had been there. Burial detail cut out all but the worst of liars from tavern stories, and made soldiery impossible for them ever again. But burial detail it was to be, so they formed their ranks, which broke quickly when it was discovered that there were shovels only for a few. Everyone ran off in a different direction to search the barns and boarded-up houses, hoping to come upon a young girl, or a wife, bathing naked in a river or lying in the sun with only a thin sheet, trying to look beautiful and get the golden hair to shine. Jack thought how nice the women of Virginia looked in the light of candles after they had been in the sun all day working or just staying by the river. But they found no women at all, only shovels in such great number that they left many behind with comrades whom they hoped with all their hearts not to see during the battle. They marched back into the quiet country whence they had come and where they saw no cannon or troops, or even telegraph lines.

  They said little, preferring to walk quietly and take in the sun, which during the afternoon stared right in their faces as they marched below great flourient oaks and trees with blooming flowers. Then they came to a wide field. On the northern half of a small green prairie were hundreds of dressing stations, round white tents in orderly rows. They looked like mushrooms. And they were far away, so that it was hard to make out the red crosses. The burial detail entered the field from the east and walked away from the tents to a row of straight trees in the south to set up camp. Behind these trees was a smaller field of about an acre. They discovered that the heavy brush bordering it on three sides was laden with blackberries and songbirds, and hives of bees. It took only a few hours to pitch ten tents, get a good supply of wood, find water, and have an inspection. Their uniforms were clean and they had eaten. Given the afternoon off, some went into the brush to brave the bees and gather blackberries for themselves and for the cook, who had the other things for a pie but lacked a filling. Some went to a small stream and, even though it was too shallow for swimming, let the water course over them while they looked up at the pines on the steep bank. Jack Japan, The Glass, filled a bag with pine needles and he and some others kicked it around the field where the graves would be.

  They had only to wait. After a short cold dinner they drank their coffee and became aware of the nurses. Across the field they could see nurses in almost glowing white making quick lines from tent to tent. The lieutenant used his telescope to report that women near the fires were staring downfield at the opposing ranks of flame. On both sides of the meadow, hands went up to fix hair and straighten collars. Then, perhaps because it was wartime, and they had also been there first, about a hundred of the nurses began to walk slowly into the dark. They came from all along the line, two or three carrying lanterns which showed the gentle night breeze. At the gravediggers’ it was as if an enemy army were converging. The men felt frightened at being still, so a number of them set out for the middle, and after a little while the rest followed. They met, and strolled back to the dressing stations in a lighthearted manner, as if they were not a contingent of nurses and gravediggers but just young men and young women at a June ball. There was easy laughing of the kind when people do not know one another and yet want to. Billy Fair took his five-stringed banjo from a black case he had been carrying strapped to his back like a rifle, and he played for a long time and put everyone at ease. They wished they had some wine, but there was none. Although many were complimented by them, no one could see the uniforms—just the faces of those across the fires. For years they had all worn bits and pieces of uniforms from surplus, and had craved them. But in full dress with real insignia they felt a good deal less romantic. A girl imagined herself in a white gown, and a boy there wanted to be wearing a fine dark suit with a white flower. Beyond the fires, moon-whitened grass touched like a girl’s hand to music in all directions because of the night breeze.

  The nurses had little to do, for the battle had not started, and soon there was a free exchange with the burial detail, and swimming and Field Day games. They took walks into the forest where they saw deer and herons, where everything was hot and nature fast music moving to excite them. Jack took up with a French Canadian nurse named Montay, who swam with him and told him that the herons in the small lake were not loons. Fie hardly knew her for she and he shared a gloss as if in a dream, something they didn’t mind at all, because they could dream breakers out in the field—so unreal was his life, the life of a conscripted soldier in an enormous field where the men were served blackberry pies and sunburned nurses glided across in evening to sit by the fires and the men they found, who found them, too.

  One day a doctor walked across the field to speak with the tall lieutenant. In his clean white tunic the doctor pointed to the small field and indicated how he wanted the graves. He wanted five pits: thirty feet long, ten feet wide, and eight feet deep. He advised them to start right away, because he had heard that the offensive was due to begin any time. Since they faced a well-fortified enemy, it was necessary to prepare for heavy casualties. The graves would take three hundred, good enough for the first few days at least. Quickly they began to dig, ten to a grave, and the lieutenant did not supervise but removed his tunic and worked beside the men. Nor was there any military discipline, for they thought of themselves as gravediggers, and what a world it would be if gravediggers were disciplined. Soldiering for them was already dead and worn. They looked fine though, in striped military pants with suspenders hanging down their thighs. It took them two days of digging in silence to finish, for in some places the ground was hard.

  Then a messenger galloped into the dressing station and fires were lit in preparation for the wounded, who arrived within a few hours. During the first night Jack lay on his blanket and watched the many fires and lanterns across the field. Ambulances came often, shining their lights on the tents. There were many fires; it became hot in the nights, and he wondered if Nurse Montay, whom he hardly knew and whom he missed though she was just on the other side of the enameled green, was sweating by the night fires as she worked.

  In the daytime the first dead were brought on hideous blood-soaked stretchers. The men were white, and Jack lowered them without shrouds into the graves. At night he stared at the fires, and then at the great overflowing masses of high white stars above him in untangled black. They trailed the sky and brought morning. He made more graves, did not bother to wash, a
nd found that his clothes were filthy. Every day the ambulances became more numerous. The battle had swung their way. It was hot, and it got hotter, and they had no beer.

  On their last evening there, when graves covered the small clearing, as if in a dream a nurse rode up on a sweaty brown mare. The mare’s saddle and blanket were soaked into blackness and the nurse was covered with layers of mud and dust which made her clothes and face the telling pea-green color of an army road. Her white uniform and its blue, chevron-shaped, gently falling collar were splattered up to her hair, which was golden and had retained its sheen. The gravediggers gathered around her; one held the bridle of her horse and comforted it, for it was in profound exhaustion. The silent men could see that she was selfless, that she had been battered, and that she had come from the front, where they knew the machines were working which sent them their dead. She had retained her beauty though she was gray and colorless but for her hair. Her mouth was especially exquisite and her teeth white. It was painful pleasure to watch her speak.

  “Is there anything we can do?” said Jack after a long silence, and they all waited for her answer.

  “Yes,” she said, “yes...”

  “Tell us,” said another soldier.

  “I am looking for my husband. He was on the line, and then he was wounded and they brought him to my dressing station. He had influenza as well. I was gone for just a little while, but when I returned his bed was empty. I was wondering,” she said, “I was wondering...” And then she cast her eyes level to the acre of buried dead and stared for a long time, a long, long time, during which there was silence and they could hear the steady blows of an ax across the field. Fires burned to her left and to her right, the horse was no longer winded and she herself seemed to sit straight as an officer.