A Dove of the East: And Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  In Austerlitz Station, a Paris June, and lines of children waiting for special trains to take them to Brittany, Germany, and the Alps. Leon had come with his father to await the train. The little boy carried a small bag in which was a carefully packed tin of sandwiches, chocolate, a penknife, and a French translation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He wore schoolboy’s shorts, a Bristol blue shirt, and an enameled pin glowing red and white with the Swiss flag and the name “Suisse.” He was young enough to half think, half imagine that the pin and small military bag would set him apart as a youthful Swiss official returning gravely to the country he knew so well, on a mission vaguely connected with banking, military affairs, and the prevention of German rearmament. And so he acted haughty and serious, silent, and in a way he thought to be adult. His father, a gentle but tough-looking man who had seen the Great War almost from its very beginning to its absolute end as a press officer assigned to all battles on all fronts, accompanied him and stood there in a gray suit with a Legion of Honor pin he had earned by filing thousands of dispatches to inform the public of the carnage. He had started with fine description, casting a good eye on the rapid clash of those two armies and the suffering countryside underneath, and had ended half-alive, with reports as clipped and sad as Morse code. But during the war he had fathered a son, an only son, who brought him back alive and restored his humor.

  While standing by his boy he passed greetings to other fathers he knew or with whom he was acquainted, and this included a doctor of considerable wealth and age who lived in the same district and frequented the same restaurants and bookstores. The doctor’s daughter was tall and looked older than her age: she had the most beautiful mouth and eyes Leon’s father had ever seen, and when he saw her as he greeted her father he felt as if he were looking simultaneously into the past and the future. He was understanding what his son could only feel, that the life of their generations was here reborn, and blessed, and compassed; Leon in his confusion had only a sense as strong as memory of all his life, while shattering whistles reverberated between shafts of dusty light as trains ended or began what trains exist for.

  They did not reach Kreuzlingen on the Baden-See until the middle of the next day, when the children were exhausted and gray despite the freshness of the air and the hunting-horn atmosphere. They could see Germany on the far side of the lake, and since borders were for him always the most exciting places in the world, clear demarcations promising something different and new throughout their entire lengths, he spent much time that summer watching the high clouds crossing to Germany with the grace of gliding dirigibles. And the light from them was so much more superb, separating into currents, corridors, and rays of gray and silver. The frontier was then a place of prosperous romance, the fields of Bavaria enameled green and settled nightly with cold clear mist were as joyous and beautiful as a twelve-year-old boy could have wished. He was a Jew from Paris and beginning to open up on the world, with these his first views royal—something he considered later, achingly, a mean trick of a God whose savage beauty made sharp mountains of ice and rock rise suddenly out of soft green fields.

  WHEN HE came finally upon the place he had found several days before and to which he had guided one of the men (who was then in the process of guiding the herd), he dismounted to rest and water his horse. He removed the bridle and bit, unfastened the rifle scabbard and saddlebags, hobbled the horse, and let her drink.

  In the same way that he had years before rationed out his lunch on the way to Kreuzlingen so that different sandwiches were assigned to various cities and the chocolate was divided between Lausanne and Zurich, he had determined that upon reaching the watering place he would have four squares of chocolate, one biscuit, a dried apricot and banana, five sips of water from his belt canteen and one cup of cold water (because it was the middle of the day and as hot as new steel). He ate slowly and with great pleasure—one thing after another, orderly, disciplined, and lasting. He was the same with his meals, which he planned, and with his room, which was as neat as his kit. This was because there was something of a German in him: he loved ordered beauty and success in objective things. When a young man he had learned German to study science. And he looked English, so that he was often mistaken for a Briton or a German, this giving him great satisfaction for it has always been popular in one way or another to be a master of the world or even just to resemble the type. But more important than that, he simply was an orderly, organized man and always had been. Many people disliked that or saw it as a sickness, but he could not see why, and anything under his control became almost immediately as shipshape as the bridge of an English cruiser. This was good for running things, judging disputes, understanding the way things worked. He was a good scout because he ordered the shape of the land in his mind and made calculations as to where and when to go. People who simply threw themselves at the land and did not weigh and judge its characteristics usually fell in the ravines or ended up red-faced on the army road. “In that case,” said Leon, “it would have been just as wise to have sent a cow.”

  After about half an hour he packed up and rode out, backtracking along the winding ridge to the path he had found earlier, arriving after several hours on a wide plateau with soft earth and a few palms scattered here and there. He was riding in a little grove of trees, trying to find open water or a well, when he noticed that it was getting late. Perhaps, he thought, I will sleep here for a few hours and then go back when the moon has risen. It’s clean here, and the leaves make a nice sound in the wind. In fact he was very happy about camping in the grove because it seemed somehow European. It was several acres of small trees, some palms, and many pines, and quite a few deciduous saplings whose leaves were like bronze medallions. Then he began galloping his horse through the brush, to beat it down, to find water, to find the best place to sleep, and just for the sake of galloping itself.

  He was an excellent horseman, having studied for eight years at a Viennese riding academy in Paris, and although the trails past Versailles were not as rocky and hilly as those on the Golan he had absolute confidence. When he had arrived at Kfar Yanina—a half-bearded, ragged Frenchman spit from the hold of an illegal immigrant ship—the man who tended the few horses told him, fearing an accident, to keep off. He had done it with such contempt and superiority that Leon grabbed one of the saddled horses from him, mounted it suddenly, and began to go as far as he was able through his graduation exercises. Needless to say, the saber charges, jumps, mountings and dismountings while on the run, and highly controlled form were the beginnings of his reputation at Kfar Yanina.

  And there in the grove he drew his lariat as if it were a saber, this perhaps the most exciting instant in the life of horse or horseman, waited the tense moment, and then charged with great speed—cavalry, another fine and useless art he had inherited from the past, part of his world which had vanished. He was like cavalry speeding by trees and charging down another row with the quick turn only a quarterhorse can make; both horse and rider became heated and their blood ran fast. It was good to be sometimes like a Mongol, a Scythian, any hard fighter who used everything to find strength where there was no strength, courage where there was no courage, swirling cold air to beat against the fire of his activity. He shot down the rows breaking the grasses, the horse's hoofbeats echoing callously through the trees. He took his rope and with it beat at the trunks of the palms, strapping them fiercely as if they were an enemy. And then he paused at one end of the grove, red and wet, his blood surging through him, his lower jaw trembling, and he began to scream at the trees. He said no words but his voice, like that of an attacking animal, could be heard at a great distance—even though no man was there to hear. The horse was frightened and her eyes went round and back. The wind stopped, and almost as if he had been trying to drown its rustling through the branches above him Leon stopped too and tears began to fall from his eyes all over the saddle and his horses wet back. He cried for a long time, and then dismounted and slept.r />
  When he awoke, it was dark. He could see by the light of the stars his horse standing a few feet away, looking at him as if to say, If you do this again, I’ll go. He stood up and tended the horse, reassuring her, and then, feeling as tired and drained as he could, he began to make his own little camp. He broke some branches to build a fire for tea, which he drank while he ate some biscuits and beef. Usually when he made camp it was as tight as a drum, but this time everything was scattered. He was just too tired to impose a design on the few things he had lying about him. He spread his blankets, jammed a magazine of ammunition into his rifle, and lay down to listen for an hour or so to enter the frame of mind which would assure him alertness to any strange sound, even while he slept. Rifle by his side, he started the silence.

  In between shudderings of the trees he heard a whistling, a weak deathlike wheeze at regular intervals off on his left. He waited, not knowing what it was. It sounded like a child’s idea of a witch’s sigh, a frightening noise from and within the darkness. It was, and this he sensed for sure, a steady death rattle. He waited more, and his lethargy fled from him as fast as alcohol disappears on the ground. Now he was planning and alert; like a bat he turned his head to and fro, searching the coordinates of the sigh to see if it were moving, while all the time checking the opposite silent sides where he expected surprise. No grasses rustled except in the wind, but perhaps it moved only then? It didn’t, because it stayed in the same quarter.

  If it were an enemy, what would be the sense in alerting him—perhaps to frighten him and steal his wits away, perhaps to confuse? But the man who could make such a noise was beyond Leon’s imagination or experience. So terrible and pathetic was it that he thought perhaps he was mad. Remembering how he had screamed at the trees and beat them, he feared that they were whining in the darkness, and bleeding, and wailing like broken bodies. His fear grew white in front of him.

  Then in a half beat of his heart he became less afraid and instead angry; he could see the darkness again, and the stars. He pulled his boots all the way on, and determined but fearful started toward the sound ever so quietly rifle in hand with its safety off and his finger on the trigger, ready to fight without fear when the moment came, as he had done several times before in war. Yet he knew that he had to judge finely, for it could be an innocent making that hideous noise. He, of all men, was alert to that. And perhaps because of that he did not fire when he ranged in on it and fixed its exact location, but kept walking toward it, transfixed by its steadiness and by its weakness, as if the faint whistle were air rushing past the fine points of the stars. It was closer than he thought and without intending to he came directly upon it. He saw what it was.

  “Oh God in heaven,” he said. It was a dove. He had trampled it with his horse and it was dying.

  HAVING ONLY the light of the stars, he could see no colors. But he had lived in the same shade as doves for a quarter of a century, and was able to deduce from patterns and shadings in the black and white the colors he knew so well—a process which signified for him the depth of his life. It was an Eastern dove, not a shock of white and pure line as in the West, but many-colored, as deep contradictions ran through, and it was beautiful.

  The wings of a dove are white-tipped, slate gray brown as the Nile, then bronze along the back to a gold rim at the neck. A turn of the head changes the colors. The neck feathers have a shimmering purplish tinge. Similarly, the slate gray tends to green or blue. Watching it fly is like watching a storm on a tropical sea; the rich hot colors well up and spread across its surface like rain on blue green. Its head, as smooth as a hawks silken hood, or an airman’s leather helmet, with large brown eyes, is patterned with circlets and triangles and rims of white—like a Persian woman made up. It is always tending itself, and flies gracefully amid the olive trees and to date palms, winging and gliding in the clear air of the white hot valley.

  But this dove was sick and silent, except for its sigh which had stopped when Leon came upon it, as if it had expected to die. Its wing lay extended, clearly it had been broken, and at the point where wing and body fused Leon could see a deep unnatural depression. Its head was tilted to one side somewhat strangely, and its eyes half closed in pain and waiting. It lay on a fallen palm branch, legs wedged between the thin green leaves.

  He simply could not leave it there in its labored breathing to die in the cold and dark, with no one, no other dove, to form a chain from eye to eye, to show love at the last moment, to be there until one was not needed. To die alone is to die a perpetual death, forever unfinished like a straight course into the black of the sky. To die alone is not to have lived. So he took his knife and clipped the palm branch to form a tray, pruning off the extremities and the weak pointed tips of the leaves, and he carried the dove back through the underbrush to his camp. There he rekindled the fire and put the dove and its tray on a folded blanket. He could see in the firelight all the colors he had assumed, and the white ringlets. The dove stopped sighing, and with renewed energy managed to open its eyes a little and turn its head to watch the fire, and Leon, and the white nettles and grasses which were shining in the light of the flames.

  For a long time he just stared at it. He tried to give it cool water but it would not drink. He tried to give it fruit he diced with his knife, but it would not eat. Then he laid aside the fruit and water, and after putting more twigs and some heavy branches on the fire, lay down propped on his elbow near the dove, and stared at it trying to decide what to do.

  He could not heal it; that was impossible. He could, however, wait with it until it died or until it got better. The chances that it would live were greater that way, since he thought it would eventually take food from him and thus not starve. But it might take days, he thought to himself, and meanwhile Yossi and the herd are waiting for me. If I don’t come it will be bad for all the animals, each one of them a thousand times this light dove, and dozens of men will be sent to look for me. And they probably would not find me. When I returned, what would I tell them? And if they did find me, what would I tell them then? They would think me crazy and never trust me again, but how can I leave this dove?

  Leaving the dove was out of the question. When he looked at it he knew he would have to wait with it, despite ugly things that would be said, and stories that would go around. Life was not rich there, and people depended on the welfare of the animals. Were they to know why he stayed away from the herd for days and days, jeopardizing its course and making everyone worry, they would never forgive him. And where would he go? And what profession would he follow?

  They would say, Why so much trouble just for a dove? Do you not eat meat, and chicken? And since he did, he would not be able to answer them. They would say, You were irresponsible in your job, and you paid no attention to the welfare of several hundred men, women, and children. For what? For a dove that was going to die in any case? And he would not know what to say to them. But he could not leave the dove, and as the night passed he lay by it as if it were a sick child, tired himself, half dreaming. He lay there as if in a fever, breathing as slowly as the dove, determined to see it through.

  PASSING A gun shop in the Champ de Mars one fall he felt a great longing to be quail shooting. But he had not had, and had never had, nor would he ever have the slightest desire actually to shoot the quail. He wanted to be dressed in strong leather boots, in khaki pants with pockets on the thighs, to wear a rust-colored tweed jacket with shooting patches, a bandolier of copper bullets, and to carry a deep black shotgun of fine craftsmanship and light weight. He wanted to make his way across country (there was a specific image of gold and yellow grass and a view of low hills and apple orchards) and to come out of the darkness finally with cheeks reddened from the cold and an alert demeanor, to a fire and hot tea. But he had no desire whatever to shoot them. Hunting was merely a slaughterhouse with country accouterments. Why not simply abstract and abandon the slaughterhouse? And yet he ate meat, and would continue, for cruel inconsistency was part of what made life. He
became sick when he tried vegetarianism. A proselytizing friend of his who suggested it was thin and the color of ashes in the fireplace flue. Those who saw him, immediately thought of the morgue; there was just something smooth and dull about his gray face—a lack of stolen energy and the evil sparkle of the predator. But for sport? Never, it was just the equipment, the sounds of walking through dry clean brush, the ice cold small rivers by which to halt.

  And he loved so much to love that he wondered if he were drawn to it by all but love itself. Walking in the Champ de Mars, a place of orange and blue awnings and quiet curving streets, he felt at twenty so hypnotized by love, by its idea, by the beauty of the women he saw. He stared at them—not with the pompous, self-worshipping, suspiciously homosexual gaze of the Mediterranean strutter, but rather with an openness and humility, a simplicity which for a numbing moment worked its way even to his fingers and back and caused the whirling of an electrified moment to become a feeling of history. History, the means by which he loved, the recollection of all men and all women gazing at one another in times past; the graveyards of Paris, strangely untended and quiet as before a war, full of charted lives which had seen such hot permanent moments as he felt on the Champ de Mars, the hollowness and waste of societies of men and their deeds in the face of these breathless confrontations when the world went silk and eyes moved as if they could feel.