by Mark Helprin
And he was going to teach it to Fredericka. He knew from the story of Paolo and Francesca that nothing could match the intimacy between a man and a woman as both studied the same text over days and weeks. Then it is that love and desire fuse most powerfully, that one soul becomes the other and the other becomes it. With the world spread out before them and the perfume of uncountable pines filling the air, they would lose themselves entirely in imagination of the Mediterranean and its ancient wars.
They laid out the texts on a long desk beneath one wall of windows in the observation room, and worked on them side by side. To fulfil their obligation to the forest, they merely had to look up every half hour and scan the distance for smoke. As they did this, slowly over 360 degrees, they found that the forests and mountains sharply compressed in their binoculars were as beautiful and fascinating as anything that had ever been written.
At Centennial Seven they had among other things a Winchester Model 70 in case grizzlies should attack; pure water from an icy torrent two hundred feet down the mountainside; six weeks of supplies neatly stacked in pine cupboards; a radio that seemed to crack with the static of the galaxies and nebulae; a terrace on the roof, accessible by hatch and ladder; and a beautifully drawn, highly detailed map under glass on a huge table in the centre of the room. With this they could locate any fires they might detect by plumes of smoke in daylight and orange sparks at night. Their foam mattress was underneath the table, beneath the map’s many shades of green that spread over them like a baobab tree.
The tower rose sixty feet from the crest of a ridge, and they could look over the treetops with ease. From windows on all sides the world was visible to the horizon, except that to the north a massive rockface rose abruptly and blocked the view. On the other side of this wall, seven miles distant by a trail that led through forests and over alpine meadows the home of bear and elk, was Centennial Six, the centre tower, where Lucia lived and from which she managed the line via radio. She was alone there, and awakened only every hour to observe. This was allowed to her because some of her sector was covered by another line of towers to the north, a lot was rock, and even in summer much remained blanketed in snow.
The helicopter pilot had said that the previous occupants of Centennial Seven had dispensed with clothing. Except for Lucia, who announced her visits beforehand, even in midsummer only a few people a month came within ten miles of the tower. You could live there, if you wished, like Adam and Eve.
“Adam and Eve Piesecki?” Fredericka had asked, to put the pilot off the subject, but later, in private, she seemed quite interested.
“You’d like to be a nudist?” Freddy asked. “I bloody well will never be a nudist.”
“Of course not, idiot. Nudists live in camps. This would be just the two of us.”
“Even when we get water, and work? I would be carrying a rifle in the buff ? What if someone came? What if a bear came?”
“Bears are naked, too. That’s why they’re called bears.”
“It’s libertine.”
“It is permitted,” Fredericka stated, slowly and seductively, “by the bonds of holy matrimony, which permit the other things that we do, in their great variety, and that, I should think, would flourish here, where we are entirely alone and no one could possibly hear any sounds.” She cleared her throat.
“What about accidents?” asked Freddy. “Things getting caught in things where normally they would not be extended, in hinges and doors and hatch covers.”
“I will make sure,” Fredericka said, “that whatever is extended is protected. I will keep on top of it meticulously.”
“You will?”
“I will.”
Thus, the first time they sat down to read the Iliad, they had been naked for days.
“Here is the Greek alphabet,” said Freddy. He had written it out in fluid strokes on a lustrous sheet of paper.
“Is that the telephone?” asked Fredericka.
“No, it’s the alphabet.”
“Not the alphabet—I know that the alphabet doesn’t make a noise—the telephone.”
“We don’t have a telephone.”
“Shhh! That.”
“That’s a woodpecker.”
“It sounds like a telephone.”
“Nonetheless, it is a woodpecker, and this is the Greek alphabet.”
“Look at that,” Fredericka said. “You could be Greek. Where did you learn it?”
“I began when I was five years old.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Yes. This is alpha.”
“You mean as in alphabet?”
“That’s where the word alphabet comes from. The second letter is beta.”
“Marvellous. What do they mean?”
“Alpha is a, and beta is b.”
“Why did they have to do that? Why not just say a and b?”
“Alpha and beta came before a and b. We’re the ones who ‘did it.’ ”
“Then why did we do it?”
Freddy pondered. “I don’t know. Fredericka, are you anxious?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’ve always thought Greek was too difficult, and only for boys.”
“That was one of the injustices of your education. Now you can learn it in full confidence.”
Thus began their study of the classics, as they sat together, unclothed, high above the forest floor, beyond the tops of the trees, as alone in the warm sunlight as if at the very beginning of time.
THE BOOK that the youth had brought to Freddy along with the Iliad and Greek lexicon was a memoir recently released by a cousin fairly far removed, François-Trotsky Snatt-Ball, Viscount Stansfield. Less controversial in England than perhaps it might have been, it was an indictment of Freddy via the questioning of his sanity. Though Snatt-Ball had hardly known Freddy, they had been together in enough group photographs for him to make the case that he had. And he had had one famous encounter with Freddy, the subject of the memoir’s central chapter.
François-Trotsky, or, as Freddy called him, with a treacherously steep a, Viscount Snatt-Ball, was a huge, fat thing with no self-discipline, and the way Freddy and his father devoted themselves to physical pursuits offended him. He had written a catty article in which he suggested not only that this was a middle-class-German characteristic they could not shake, but that both had undergone electro-shock therapy for the purpose of making them less compulsive, and, for good measure, that Paul liked to wear the queen’s dresses.
After the article was published, Freddy appeared with Snatt-Ball in a discussion of Maori immigration rights, and was content to ignore him until Snatt-Ball once again insulted the two princes. Freddy could no longer hold himself back, and joined in battle. “It is one thing that the not-so-right-honourable gentleman insults me, but it is another that he attempts to sully the name of my father, who’s sane, who, he says, is not.”
This was heard by everyone not as “my father, who’s sane,” but as “my father, Hussein.” The audience was whiplashed.
“Your father, Hussein?” Snatt-Ball asked, delighted.
“Yes,” Freddy answered, with finality, “my father, who’s sane.”
“But he isn’t.”
“Of course he is,” Freddy said. “Everyone knows it. It’s been obvious since he was born. It’s clear in everything he does. I suspect, furthermore, that, although he is, you are not.”
“Of course I’m not. Are you?”
“Yes,” said Freddy, laughing at Snatt-Ball’s admission (he had him now), “absolutely.”
“Both of you?”
“Both of us. The queen can confirm this, as can just about anyone else in the world.”
The moderator asked, “When did Your Royal Highness assume this name?”
“Whose name?” Freddy asked. Primed for it, everyone in the hall thought he had said not whose name but Hussein.
“Yes,” the moderator answered.
Because Freddy was puzzled by this answer, he
repeated it. “Yes?” he asked.
“When?” the moderator asked.
“When what?”
“When did you assume your name?”
Quite amazed, Freddy looked sceptically at the moderator, and perhaps amusedly, but with an edge. “When I was born,” he said, emphasising every word to ridicule such a stupid question. But the moderator and everyone else, knowing Freddy, assumed that he had lapsed, as was his frequent custom, into Pidgin English, and that he had, therefore, just asked a question.
“Don’t you know?” the moderator asked.
An exasperated Freddy was beginning to lose patience. “What’s going on here?” he asked. “What is it that you want to know?”
This was for Britain a moment of high drama, and the moderator screwed his courage to the sticking place. “I suppose the audience would like to know, Your Royal Highness, if you are the Prince Hussein, and, then, if your father is the Prince Hussein.”
Freddy sighed condescendingly. “I can assure you that we both are.” He tapped his head as if knocking on oak.
“Hussein?” Snatt-Ball asked loudly and incredulously.
Thinking this a question, Freddy replied very firmly, “I am.”
No one knew what to say, but thinking to press on and exploit the oddity, Snatt-Ball asked, “Are you, then, an Arab?”
“Am I an Arab?” Freddy repeated, breaking out into laughter. Answering sarcastically, and thinking that Snatt-Ball had really dug his own grave, Freddy said, “Of course I’m an Arab. Every Prince of Wales is an Arab. And,” he said, enjoying himself immensely, “a Jewish Arab—a Jewish Eskimo Arab; a Jewish, Eskimo, Mongolian Arab. Aren’t we all?” Freddy laughed uproariously at this until he noticed that he was the only one laughing. He stopped suddenly, having not the slightest clue as to what was happening, and looked searchingly at the audience. “Are you mad?” he asked. “Are you all mad?”
The newspapers seized upon this unfortunate misunderstanding, as they did always, like bears grasping salmon. The leader of The Times, and every other newspaper in the world, read, more or less, “Last night, with absolute sincerity, the Prince of Wales declared that he is a Jewish Arab by the name of Hussein. In the silence of Wigmore Hall except for the peals of his own laughter, the prince asserted repeatedly to a shocked audience these new facts that he vigorously claims.” And then it went on, “In interviews with experts in psychiatry here and abroad. . . .”
Viscount Snatt-Ball was now making immense amounts of money from the sale of My Cousin Freddy: A Viscount Tells All, and after reading about this in a newspaper, Freddy had secured his copy. Because Fredericka had to memorise various fundaments of grammar and vocabulary, she and Freddy took a break from the Iliad and he spent the day angrily peering into Snatt-Ball’s vicious memoir. He was halfway through when Lucia hiked over from Centennial Six to introduce herself and run through the procedures they had to follow.
“Hello!” she called up from the base of the tower. “Hello? Hello?”
They scrambled to pull on their clothes, from that moment on ceasing to be nudists. It had been interesting, even if unhealthy, to lie in the sun at the top of the world with neither a jot nor a tittle of cloth upon them, but after a short time they hadn’t even noticed.
When Lucia entered they greeted her with their customary formality. People in fire towers don’t say, “How do you do?” and “Delighted,” they say, “Hi,” and “Great!” She found them tremendous, curious, and horsey-looking, like the Prince and Princess of Wales. But they could not have been any such thing, even if they did speak like a sleep-deprived Laurence Olivier. “Are you English?” she asked, their resemblance to certain royal personages refusing to exit her awareness.
“Not really,” Freddy said.
“We’re from Ahlahbahmah,” they both said at the same time.
“You don’t sound like you’re from Alabama.”
“Our parents were English,” Freddy told her. “War brides and all that. You know.”
“And Desi has a speech defect,” Fredericka said.
“That’s not true, Popeel.”
“Just a little. Where are you from, Lucia?”
“Gloucester.”
“In England?” Freddy asked, warming tremendously, until Fredericka side-kicked him.
“Massachusetts.” Lucia was intensely beautiful, with a delicate, finely drawn, small face surrounded by flowing jet-black hair; eyes so wet, deep, and blue that they could have driven sapphires to suicide; and freckles, thrown across her cheeks and nose, that broke up the perfection of her face and by competing continually with its magnificent features put the beholder entirely off balance. Perhaps in all the world a hundred faces were as beautiful, but not more. It was shocking, stunning. In comeliness she far outdid Fredericka, and neither Freddy nor Fredericka could take their eyes from her. She wore a set of sapphire earrings and a ring that perfectly matched her eyes. No jewellery had ever been more breathtaking on any queen.
Her great beauty was, however, a fortress that kept her from the world, for virtually no one was capable of taking her for what she was. People would follow, revile, worship, disparage, and envy her. So many men had fallen so hard in love with Lucia at first sight, and so many women, that she considered herself as much a casualty of circumstance as if she had been hideously deformed. Tired of continual overtures not to what she was but merely to the light she reflected, she chose to live in isolation. And having made the choice of how she would live and, presumably, die, she had the grace of the self-disciplined and the serenity of someone who has bowed to the truth. She was as well, and had always been, cheerful by nature.
Better and more experienced than most at taking people for what they were, if only because the people they had had to encounter were so many and various, Freddy and Fredericka would have been perfectly at ease with her. But because they feared discovery, they were slightly nervous, which she mistook for their being overwhelmed, and she therefore attempted to make them more comfortable—just as they did with nervous commoners. In fact, she expected them not even to be able to talk to her, as often happened. Noticing the Iliad on the desk, a work which she herself had read in Greek, she asked modestly, “How’s the book?”
Freddy, who had been deeply absorbed in My Cousin Freddy, which was out of view under the map table, said, “Quite frankly, I think the little shit who wrote it should be put to death.”
“Really?” Lucia asked. “I’ve read it, and although I’m no classicist, I thought it was rather good.”
Freddy took her remark about classicism to be mockery of Snatt-Ball, and he assumed, therefore, that she was witty and sympathetic. He assumed as well that they were in the midst of a kind of literary game, as in the court of Louis XV or, in lowly fashion, George IV.
“Death would be a synonym for justice,” Freddy said.
“But he’s already dead.”
“He is?” Freddy asked. “When?”
“I don’t know the exact date. No one does.”
“Maybe he was crushed by an escalator,” Freddy speculated. “That’s an especially painful way to go. Are you sure he’s dead?”
“I’m absolutely sure, and I doubt that he was crushed by an escalator.”
“Fredericka,” Freddy said, forgetting himself. “Did you hear? He’s dead. May he rest in peace, but, I must say, it is delicious.”
“Delicious?” Lucia asked. “What is it that you object to?”
“The pettiness of it,” said Freddy, getting agitated just in thinking about it, “the stupidity, the inaccuracy, the slanderous and dissolute gossip.”
“What about the poetry?” Lucia asked.
“Poetry!” Freddy exclaimed. “There’s less poetry in that stinking book than on a condom wrapper.”
Astonished, Lucia said, “Then why are you reading it?”
Entirely forgetting himself, Freddy said, “Because it’s about me.”
“It is?”
Before Fredericka could shut him up, Fredd
y, oblivious of everything, said, “Yes. He’s the one who accused me of thinking that both my father and I were Hussein. I said, ‘my father, who’s sane,’ not, ‘my father, Hussein.’ ” (This sounded to Lucia like one and the same thing.) “He made that the theme of the book.”
“That would be news to Achilles,” Lucia said, charmed by Freddy nonetheless.
“Who’s Achilles?” Freddy asked.
“He’s in the book, too.”
“No he isn’t,” Freddy declared authoritatively.
Fredericka was behind Lucia, frantically pointing to the Iliad. Now Freddy understood, but, wanting to camouflage his indiscretions, was forced to continue. “Ah,” he said, “Achilles. Yes, he is in the book. I had forgotten.”
“Of course, who needs Achilles?” Lucia said.
“Actually,” Freddy told her, “I was speaking indirectly. That’s what literary critics do.”
“They do, don’t they.”
“Yes, it’s a way of expressing the essence of a work by venting one’s imagined passions. In truth, I don’t like that technique. I detest it. I had to do it,” he said, pointing to Fredericka, “because she wanted me to demonstrate and practise it.”
“I did not,” Fredericka protested.
“Yes you did, remember?”
“Oh, yes, I do remember. I did.”
“All right,” said Lucia, “can we start from the beginning?”
“Of the Iliad?” Freddy asked.
“No, of the fire tower.”
Then ensued a long and pleasant conversation, during which they looked out at the great and immobile range of mountains over which masses of white clouds were sailing like ships of the line.
