A Dove of the East

by Mark Helprin

  JETS FROM airfields in Nevada trailed fine white lines across the sky. At the head of white columns the planes themselves looked like silver ticks. When she looked up, there was a roundness of light as if she were seeing through glass or a lens, but she was only looking through her eyes. All her life the B-52S had left their smoke trails above her. It was almost a part of nature, akin to the rising of the moon, or setting of the sun.

  They were miles from Tippet, a town of about thirty-five, and Tippet was miles from anywhere else. You could pull in two or three country music stations. Sheep grazed in the lower depressions of the mountains and drank from clear pools, near gray porous rocks. In summer Henry made a fire, and lining his sheep up one by one he pulled off the ticks and cast them into the flame. Always the air was cool and deep. Around the house was no argument, no lawn—just pine trees, wind, and a view of mountains. Winter was hard and sometimes it snowed late in June, though only at night. They were high up where the air was thin. They didn’t waste it. Stories were therefore short, expressions clipped, and Agnes had a habit of giving long looks without saying a word, during which her mouth was slightly smiling and her eyebrows slightly raised. When she looked this way, everyone knew she was good-natured and wanted to kiss her and twirl, eyes closed, with so much in reserve.

  She cooked. Steam swirled upward around the spoon as she looked into the pot, her body arched away from the stove. The kitchen was full of windows. Through them was miraculous blue and white of mountains, hanging aerial ice, and sky.

  And her face. Her face was an extremely beautiful face. When she laughed you did not laugh at her face nor did she become less pretty. When she was angry it was the same. The eyes were blue. There was a mirror in the hall, surrounded by a frame of grayish-white tin. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw the blue eyes, shining out, and the simple blond hair, energetic. “Bong Bong,” she said as she patted her hair into place and went to the porch to wait for Henry.

  She was wearing a loose white dress held together at the neck by a button which said, “All the Way with Alf Landon.” The wind blew her hair. She settled her eyes to stare into the valley, past the rocks, past the sheep that looked like moving cylinders of cream or cloud, past the pools and pines, to the road where Henry would be coming. She picked up a knife and stuck it into the chopping block on which it had been lying. She loved Henry, and had doused everything to marry him. Those are the only marriages that work—where you say to hell with it, and hurt three or four dozen people, and tell fifty more to go to hell, and then move out to Nevada or Alaska, or Brazil. If you don’t do that, you’re not really married. She was married to Henry. Henry tried to tell their parents about how to marry.

  “Why?” said their parents.

  “Because,” said Henry, “if you love you make no concessions—none at all. And in the beginning this is especially true. And Agnes and I are angry at concessions—little ones, big ones. We want to start clean. I love Agnes. We bought a sheep ranch.”

  The pot was boiling over. She went in and turned off the heat. It was a simple principle: if the pot boils over, turn off the heat. She always thought passionately that to think is somehow dispassionate. Henry said she was right and drove her in his car up the mountain to their house with the whitening tin-framed mirror where they saw themselves in dusty silver and wondered what was the toughest road they knew.

  She went back to her chair on the porch. She led an orchestra with the spoon, and sang several songs. Henry was a hard worker, very strong for his size, and he made up stories. He never went anywhere without adventures. He once had wept in her lap at the top of a mountain. She kissed her hands, ran them down her breast, and said a prayer, for she believed in God, as did Henry—in His power, and that He made everything. That is really why they told everyone to go to hell, for they needed no one, and saw that no one believed.

  She prayed to God, surveying His hills and rising high above them, glancing at green pines, and turning humorous circles in heaven. She loved God, and she loved Henry. God made her shake like a true priest, and although she was quiet she was thundering at the hills for His sake, and for Henry’s sake.

  Henry came up the mountain in the wooden station wagon. There were books on the seat next to him, and groceries in the back. He was driving to music. She could see by the way he moved his head from side to side and was rhythmically intent on making the car sway gracefully up and down turns, through the cool sunshine air.

  HE PULLED up and left the radio on. He got out of the car and walked around the front to face Agnes, who was on the porch, as still as a branch.

  He was dark-haired and had a wide smile. He wore a bulky olive Navy N-I jacket, denim pants, and brown leather boots. She looked at him and remembered what she had looked like in the mirror—tan, her nose a little shiny, in a white dress and crown of blond, with blue eyes sadly piercing the leaded glass darkened from age in the mountains.

  They were still, and the wind ceased. “Well,” she said, and raised her eyebrows slightly.

  “I told them that I wouldn’t go,” he said. “That I wouldn’t go to prison either, that we both would go into the mountains and fight there to the death, on the little point, for what we believed. And when I said it, I meant it. Were right, aren’t we, Agnes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they met for about ten minutes. When they came out, the psychiatrist took me aside and told me I was not fit for military service.”

  Agnes lifted the sheets of her dress, floated down the steps, twirled in slow motion over millions of particles of white dust, circled dizzy around Henry while he laughed and leaned back and looked at her blue sparkling eyes. “We’re both crazy,” he said. “Aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” said Agnes, “and we’re free.” And they sat on the wooden steps of the porch and said that the day was especially fine.

  “Why,” Henry said, “do you have that spoon so tightly in your hand?”

  And Agnes began to cry.

  RUIN

  MY FATHER was a cattle rancher in Jamaica. One day after the war he had become sick after eating a bad piece of frozen meat, and that was it. Suddenly all our cane went down and men began putting up fences. By himself my father took the Oracabessa launch to Cuba, went up into the mountains he said, and came back a week later with a Cuban he had known during the war in North Africa. Pappy was his name, and he had two teeth in his mouth and looked thin and stupid, but he knew cattle.

  It was a risk for my father to take the Oracabessa launch across the straits in September. It was only ninety miles, but September in Jamaica is the time for bad storms; they come up quickly. He was very daring, my mother told me, after the war, and I remember it a bit myself. All the men were a little like that. My mother said that after Al Alamain my father thought he could do anything. He was impetuous, like a young boy, the war having taught him both how temporary life is, and how valuable.

  He had been a cane grower all his life, that was what he knew, but he was willing to learn cattle. He put every penny, every quattie of what we had, into a small herd, and a prize black bull that came from Corpus Christi in October and was lowered from the freighter to the dock, hung from a bright yellow sling. When the yellow sash was dropped away and we could see the bull’s blackness and the rotations of green that were its eyes, my father was a proud man. The bull looked up and snorted, its eyes fixed on the mountain, and Pappy said with a hideous gentle smile that it smelled the herd, and that the sea voyage had done it no good.

  Our house had red tiles on the roof. They glowed vermilion in the sun. We heard drums on Friday and Saturday nights; drifting up from the town, the sound was marvelous and frightening. When my father was troubled he walked down the mountain on the winding road, and stayed for a long time on the wall overlooking the sea. It was terribly hot and still in the morning. Everyone wore white. I was often aware of carrion rotting unseen in some soft place.

  I was quite surprised when, a week after we took the bull off the sh
ip, Pappy ran onto the terrace and turning his straw hat rapidly in his hands announced that the bull had gone wild and was killing the other animals. My father got up slowly and put down the Gleaner. He was in white pants and a white shirt, and he was stained beautifully with colors, for he had been painting a picture; he had been painting fish and fruit. I followed him to his room where I watched him load a .30-06, pushing in the dull brass cartridges one by one. He seemed to be angry and perhaps a little frightened. I was frightened for him.

  We started at a walk down the hill but then we began to run. At the bend Hamid was waiting for us with two horses, a beautiful black one for my father and the nice brown one called Kerry for Pappy. My father pulled me up behind him and we flew down the hill with the Trades whipping our hair and flinging Pappy’s hat onto his back where it hung by a cord. The rifle bumped against my face and I had trouble hanging on but we reached the field, which was streaked with the blood of cows as if some Japanese had been flying kites with long red ribbons which when the wind died were left parallel on the grass. The blood steamed, especially near the places where cows had fallen. Some of them groaned but most were just breathing deeply as if they hoped to get better.

  The bull was at the end of the field and his head was covered and clotted with blood; it made thick cakes which clung to his hair. He was stained with red.

  My father told me to hang on tightly, and I made my thin arms a tourniquet around his waist. I was very much afraid of falling off the horse. I could smell the paint on my father’s shirt and the sun made me blink. He put the rifle in a sling position, so he could hold it in one hand and the reins in another. He did it quickly and well; it must have been one of the things he learned in North Africa. He spurred the horse and it started to prance, foaming, toward the bull. Silent Jamaicans pressed against the fences. They were watching us on the wet black horse.

  The horse danced sideways at the bull, elegantly, as if we were not in a green palm ring on a cliff above the sea but in a London riding academy.

  The bull stomped the ground. My father cocked the rifle. The horse, rocking and edging, had spasms of fright. That black horse was a good horse. He was frightened but he risked his life for what as far as he knew was my father’s whim. My father said that if he could be as good a man as that horse was a horse, he would be happy and ready to rest. Pappy called the black horse an astronomer, because at night he looked long into the air at the stars, sometimes for hours.

  The bull charged us and I felt my father’s muscles tense as he aimed quickly and fired. I did not see the bull fall because I had turned my head away. But I saw the waves of our action in the faces of the people at the fences, who started, and then cheered. As we trotted away from the bull’s body I looked back. There were two large red holes in the neck. I had remembered only one shot.

  We visited the cows one by one and killed them. The horse seemed more frightened of them than of the bull. My father said, “Now we are going to have to get rid of all this meat, and buy new cows dammit.”

  “New ones?” I said. He did not answer. “Can we...?” I did not finish.

  We went up the hill at a walk. It was hot, and the hooves of the black horse were scarlet.

  FIRST RUSSIAN SUMMER

  HIS HAND shaking, fingers spread so that the old man was imploring with the very breadth of his grasp for the attendant to be silent, he made the room still. The curtains ceased billowing inwards, and a reddish light from afternoon and the bricks seemed to dim. The difference between an old man and a boy is so great that in explaining himself, assuming that he can, an old man will want much time and silence. In order to give time and silence one must have great respect, perhaps the reason the young are taught to defer, not for the sake of deference itself, but to give them an opportunity to learn lessons of difficulty. Of course there are old fools, but when guiding young fools their experience can be invaluable. If a man, even an average man, has learned well by observation, then he should be in great demand. One might think young men could easily consider their fathers and grandfathers a most precious resource, aside from allowance and inheritance. Since it is not that way and wisdom finds no market, old men spend much time talking to white walls.

  This old man, though he lived in the Hebrew Home for the Aged, was not the kind of fellow to spend all morning putting on his pants. He was aged it is true, and he had no one, no one, and nothing, that is true too. But age was something inappropriate to him, having come by accident in between observations of great magnitude. He looked quite unlike the other patients in that he was tan and ruddy. His strong face and gleaming eyes showed that he spent many hours in the sun, if only in the garden, and that here was a man who although heavy with age was as light inside as a man could be, a man whose imagination and memories kept him in steady forward flight and beat down time as easily as white gulls rise high on currents of shimmering blue air.

  At eighty he found himself able to make a powerful case for that which he thought just and good, and like all good men he found himself most of the time alone in a world which insists on the worship of local gods, a world blind to the fact of its own creation, being, and turning, a world of clever bugs who have a buggish strut and who make excuses for their mortality in the minute and insignificant gas of their works. The greatness of the world he thought is not in anything man has done but in what God has done. And this made him remember a time long ago. It was a simple memory, but he loved it, and in recalling it he felt the color of his life.

  As a little boy he had gone for the summer to his grandfather’s timber forests. That was in 1884, and his little boy’s face and eyes were to see the whole world shudder and break and become alive again more than once. But then he was just a child who had seen nothing, more than thirty years before the October Revolution, in the Russia of Czar Nicholas, when he remembered the world to be vastly green and young, with so many colors just beyond his sight, and he had for a little boy such a grown-up sense of the beauty of the world. It impressed him deeply then with the simplest it had to offer, lessons taken early from no man but from his first views, which in all their power saw him through the shaking of history and into his age.

  His grandfather met him at the station. It seemed as if the train had taken a lifetime for it had gone more than a thousand miles from Odessa. And a small sleepy blond boy with large brown eyes and a miniature suit and suitcase had rushed into his grandfather’s arms in tears, since he had never been fully convinced that the train was not an eternal matter and he himself doomed to live the rest of his life in various forms of rolling stock. But his grandfather had met him in a small black carriage pulled by a spotted horse with a white mane. The fresh air was good for the child as he watched the horse watching the road they traveled.

  When they reached a high ridge overlooking a stand of timber, fir and pine as far as the eye could see, his grandfather stopped the carriage and they both looked out on the light and dark green. Sunlight was golden and the air at that altitude was cool and clear. They were alone in vastness. “Levi,” his grandfather said, “this is the finest thing on earth, these trees and mountains, not because I own them because I don’t, as my land is not visible from here, and besides, no man owns the land. Those are man’s games. This is the finest thing on the earth, not any painting or books or music, but these trees.”

  “Why, Grandpa?” said Levi, who was already convinced.

  “Because, Levi, God made the forest and this clear air. And even if there were a man who couldn’t see that, he could see the shape of things and how astonishing they are.” Then he gave the horse its rein and took the little boy through twenty miles of trees, a forest which would turn even a vain actress away from herself. Levi learned that soft lesson and it became the steel of his life. Whenever he wanted he could put himself on that road, wide-eyed in the cool air, rushing through a newborn greenness in a time when the world loved its open spaces and colors signified all there was to know. The little boy was still in the man, as the man had been
in the little boy that day when all time touched the depth of a young child in his grandfather’s timber forests.

  KATRINA, KATRIN’

  IT HAD been a terrible Christmas. Two young men stood in the dark on a subway platform. A small orange line was at the bottom of the sky, and the stars were bright white in the blue just above the horizon. Directly overhead the sky was black, so a man’s eyes were caught and dazzled by a great mass of constellations in the cold January wind. New snow from that morning made everything quiet, and the two men, who were almost young enough to be called boys, stood in a small drift at the platform’s end. They were looking into blackness which seemed to move with the wind. Their cheeks were red and flushed. They were dressed nearly alike, for both were clerks and both worked behind yellow wooden desks with green glass-vizored lamps. They were paid exactly eighty-six dollars and fifty cents a week and they banked at the same bank. To the middle-aged women in the office and to the executives the only difference between the two was that one had a mustache, a short black mustache, very dapper, and the other did not. And they had different weeks each year for vacations, one in August, one in June, and they had, of course, different names, although they were often called by the wrong one.

  “I think,” said the one without the mustache, “that I’m going to get married. You know, to that girl I told you about, Ruth, whose father is a lawyer. You know, Ruth. I told you about her. She’s the one I took to Philadelphia, the one who is very funny.”

  “Oh yes,” said the other man, “the one who is very funny. Did you ask her?”

  “No. I haven’t really decided yet. It’s a big step, a very big step. I’ll have to spend the rest of my life with her, and unless I go cavorting around that means she will be the only woman I will sleep with from now until forever—and I love her so I don’t plan to go cavorting around.”