A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  Alessandro sat back in his chair and turned the color of a plum. Overcome with pride and embarrassment, he was too young to know that the question was still open: he thought that he had settled it.

  Then he went on to discover that diplomatic dinners have many courses, and that he was mistaken not to have imitated the ambassadors and Lia, who merely tasted each serving. Instead, spurred by triumph, he ate almost everything that was served to him, and after fourteen courses and three desserts he felt so heavy that he was not sure Enrico would be able to bear his weight.

  That and the champagne forced him to sit in a chair, like an old man, and watch Lia glide about the floor in waltzes that seemed to last forever. The trick, it seemed, was not to eat so much that you couldn't work it off in dancing immediately thereafter. Lia was waltzing with a soldier. Alessandro would dance with her later. Now he had the privilege of apprehending her beauty from afar, and though he had very little experience to tell him so, he felt that this was better because it was more likely to last into time. She moved like a cloud.

  LIA AND her brother left the Palazzo Venezia at eleven-thirty. As Alessandro stood on the cobbles and watched them get into a carriage, he wondered if he would marry her. She was exquisite, and he feared that he was blinded to everything else, that he was drawn to her by weakness, that his passion for her was incomplete. Know ing all too well the deeply religious love of the Italian poets for women they had merely seen on the street, he feared that his infatuation for Lia could never be compared to the elemental union that can occur between men and women when God is present and light surrounds them.

  He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

  Once, high in the Julian Alps, he and his father had watched a flock of birds scatter in the presence of an eagle. As the eagle moved with uncanny slowness, like a great battleship confidently steaming far offshore, and the birds scattered to bait the eagle away from their young, Alessandro's father said, "Their souls, at this moment, are full, and the eagle is nothing. God is with them for what they lack."

  His reverie interrupted by the return of his horse, who was happy to be brought up from unfamiliar stables, he mounted, and Enrico cantered out the gate into the warm spring night.

  It was a Wednesday. Rome was quiet. They went on the Via del Corso all the way to the Piazza del Popolo, but instead of turning to cross the Tiber and make their way home they galloped into the Viale del Muro Torto and through the Porta Pinciana to the small triangle of land for which the attorney Giuliani had traded the garden. Looking over the empty lots and undistinguished buildings, Alessandro suddenly realized that if he married Lia he could keep the garden. If the union would put to right the question of a garden on the Gianicolo, then perhaps other balances, too, would be set to right.

  As they rode homeward along the Villa Medici in the cool night air, under stars brighter than in any city of Europe, Alessandro heard an orchestra. Even hours earlier, this would have been a shock, an orchestra playing in the open air, and as he drew closer he heard singing. In the garden of the French Academy, a full orchestra accompanied singers in the "Ma di'..." from Norma. Alessandro tied Enrico to an iron window grate embedded in the wall, and used it as a ladder to get over the top.

  Though it was almost midnight, neither the singers nor the musicians showed any signs of exhaustion, and by the time Alessandro dropped into the garden, perfectly camouflaged in his formal clothes, they had finished the aria and started up again. If the Austrians could impale themselves ecstatically upon Strauss, the French were equally capable of a delirium spurred by Norma, even if in both cases the singers and musicians were Italian. They left Norma and jumped to Ernani and then to "Ecco la barca, " from La Gioconda, and all the while, hundreds of people wandered through the gardens. Perhaps because this was the French Academy, scores of them were attractive women. In respect to this, the embassy in the Palazzo Venezia (apart from Lia) was hopeless. Alessandro wondered why he hadn't come here rather than to the dinner. The music was better, the atmosphere less formal, the fellows of the academy and their guests not too much older than he. As the singers led the orchestra in "Già nella notte densa..." Alessandro felt every atom of the cool night air.

  Though the wide paths in the garden of the Villa Medici were lit by wavering torches, the fountain was illuminated by half a dozen electric lights. Somewhere beyond the residence, unseen, an engine turned a generator in unfailing circles to make the current that made the light. During pauses in the music, if one listened carefully, one could hear its steady optimistic sound.

  Whereas the waltzes of the Austrian embassy were wonderfully pleasurable, the singing in the garden of the Villa Medici had led him deep into speculation. He walked slowly amid the guests of the French Academy, seeking anchors for his racing thought—a dark waving branch with waxen leaves, a sight of the stars through a cut in the trees, a girl throwing back her hair to the irresistible rhythm of the song, a concordance of colors compressed in a torchlit line of sight, the stirrings of women in their silken clothing.

  Not far from the fountain, out of Alessandro's sight, were three girls who looked like they might have been models for Fragonard, one of the academy's previous residents, in that they seemed not only to reflect light, but, somehow, to hold and perhaps even to generate it.

  Younger than the youngest of the fellows, they did not know quite what to do. They talked for show even when too far from anyone to be overheard, because they accurately sensed that, however awkwardly, they were beginning to play a part.

  First in line as they paused to watch the reflections in the water was Jeannette, the youngest daughter of one of the residents. Second was Isabelle, the daughter of a second secretary in the French embassy. And last was Ariane, the daughter of an Italian doctor and a Frenchwoman. She could turn from French to Italian as fast as a swallow could change directions, and she had studied Latin, Greek, and English enough to navigate in them largely without mistakes.

  She was the youngest, but she stood out among the other girls because of her beauty. When she was a child the physical characteristics that would later make her very beautiful were so striking that she seemed to have been almost homely. Only someone of long experience might have seen breathtaking beauty awkwardly sleeping in what appeared to have been catastrophically misaligned features—the broad expanses of her cheeks and her forehead, the independent energy of her eyes, the painfully beautiful arch of her brows, the smile that, even at a distance, even in memory, filled anyone who had seen it with love and paralyzing pleasure.

  Throughout her childhood she had thought that she was ugly, and though all the evidence would later militate against her earliest conclusions, she could never abandon them, and she, more beautiful than any woman Alessandro had ever seen in life, in painting, in photographs, lived with the conviction that she was less than plain, and went about with the discomfort of someone who is embarrassed to be seen. She never quite believed, even later, when she had heard many protestations to the contrary, that when people stared at her it was not because they thought she was hideous, and this made her beautiful almost beyond belief.

  Jeannette, Isabelle, and Ariane circled the fountain, walking as slowly as they could without halting at each step, and talking as enthusiastically as if everyone were listening to them as they moved upon a lighted stage. They spoke about Aix-en-Provence. To hear them you would have thought that Aix-en-Provence was not only the capital of France and perhaps even Europe (or at least the Holy Roman Empire), but a French Valhalla.

  Young girls in Paris spoke this way about Deauville, Biarritz, or Nice, and yo
ung girls elsewhere spoke this way about Paris, but these three, not knowing Paris, had to settle for Aix. They sounded both conspiratorial and blasé, to convince themselves and others that they were on to something. They alternated experimentally between the two states, trying to find the proper voice.

  When Jeannette described an afternoon by a waterfall, she did so with erotic luxury. The girls and boys had been captivated with the idea of catching speckled trout that hovered in the waist-deep pools, and had gone in, in their clothing, at first only up to the knee, but then up to the waist, and eventually, slowly, they were diving under the water in pursuit of the fish, and emerging with their hair matted down and fresh cold water running from it, sparkling in the sun. The girls' summer dresses clung to them, showing their breasts and nipples. The boys had taken off their shirts. They lost their sense of time, which, Jeannette said, is what happens in the water, and soon began to embrace and waltz together in the cold stream, holding on for love and warmth. It would have been even more scandalous, Jeannette declared, had someone not caught a trout now and then, and, in doing so, broken the spell.

  "Were you on the bank watching this?" Ariane asked, for Jeannette had been the youngest.

  "No," Jeannette answered, as if confessing that her life had been ruined by indiscretion. "I was in the water," she said, lying, "I was in someone's arms."

  "Whose?" Isabelle asked, burning with curiosity. Jeannette would not and could not tell.

  Perhaps because she was too tall and had a spray of freckles, Isabelle expected to be eventually like her mother, the mistress more of a house than to a man. She had her eye on a farmhouse on a hill, with orchards and vineyards. Someday, she said, she would redo it, and she described rooms and new fabrics as if her heart were breaking in slow motion from the thought of substituting such things for love, although the house would be next to a river, her children would swim there, and perhaps their lives would be ideal.

  When Isabelle and Jeannette had twice remembered the bakery, and three times the cafe where they sat with their friends and drank wine, they turned to Ariane to bring in something new, to show why Aix was the superior place that made them fascinating because they had been there.

  Though she tried, Ariane couldn't do it. "I love the light in Aix," she said, but, even though she did, her heart was not in it. "And the fields. My father and I walked through the fields every day last summer, almost every day."

  One refrained from mentioning parents unless it was to lie about their youthful characteristics that one presumed would soon be handed down, or to drop offhandedly a hint about their wealth, or whom they knew.

  "What did you talk about?" Jeannette asked, almost cruelly.

  "Everything," Ariane said. She was only sixteen, and though she understood everything Alessandro understood, she had not formulated it. She was in no way glib, except when coasting on the seas of her many languages.

  "Like what?" Isabelle asked.

  "My mother," Ariane answered.

  Knowing that Ariane had lost her mother, Jeanette and Isabelle realized that they had come to a dead end.

  They kept walking, all three desperately trying to think of another line to follow, not least Ariane. Her love for her mother had welled up, as it often did, and made her conversation that evening, her walk around the fountain, her gown, her aspirations, ambitions, and all that she wanted in life, a betrayal. In an accidental test of loyalty, she was filled with love and blinded to everything around her.

  She felt the world fall away, as she knew someday it would entirely, and she felt nothing but love for the woman who had died when Ariane was twelve years old, for the woman who, in dying, was broken and tortured because she was leaving her family forever, but happy that it was she who was dying and neither her husband nor daughter.

  Alessandro had been pacing at exactly the speed of Isabelle, Jeannette, and Ariane, hidden from them by the plume of the fountain as perfectly as the speculative planet on the other side of the sun, the twin to earth, that cannot be seen. But then, as the songs of the three singers met in the air to create a fourth, more beautiful even than the others, arising as if by magic, he had turned on his heels and begun to walk counterclockwise.

  He looked up. Standing before him was a young girl, in tears.

  IN JANUARY of 1911, in the library in Bologna where Alessandro did most of his work, it was often cold enough to see breath turn white. One afternoon, an hour or so before darkness, only a few scholars were in the reading room, which was so enormous that a large woodstove heated only a shallow layer of air near the ceiling. With his legs pressed together to conserve heat, and his collar buttoned up around his neck, Alessandro was bent over half a dozen volumes spread out on a long table. He often read six books at once, not because he enjoyed it, but to check one against the other and to compare arguments and accounts. The truth was often great enough to cover in its self-contradictory expanse at least six points of view, and where one was weak or incomplete the others continued the narrative. Alessandro examined the books as if they were witnesses, and despite having to turn pages back and forth almost continuously to bring various incidents into alignment, he employed this technique to considerable advantage, for the compilation of accounts seemed to yield a product rather than a sum.

  But to read six books at once he had to study very hard, and no time was left for social affairs. He had few friends, and, when not forgotten, he was considered eccentric. In fact, he was always at the brink of being asked to leave the university. Never had he hesitated to challenge a professor, for he believed that the only authority was what was right. "The best chance you have, if you want to rise," his father had said, "is to give yourself up to loneliness, fear nothing, and work hard."

  "Are you Giuliani?" someone asked from across the ancient table where Alessandro was working, but he had whispered so softly that Alessandro hadn't heard.

  "Giuliani?"

  Alessandro looked up. Sitting across from him was someone who looked English but who spoke in unaccented Italian.

  "Yes?"

  "Do you know Lia Bellati?"

  "Yes."

  "It's more than that."

  "More than what?"

  "Never mind what I already know. In Bologna, someone with whom her family is acquainted is in trouble. Will you help? He has very few friends, and he could use one now."

  "I don't have many friends, either," Alessandro said.

  "That's perfect."

  "I don't know who he is, and I don't know who you are."

  "I came to see you because I heard that you once fought two carabinieri."

  Alessandro put down his pen. "They chased me."

  "They fired, and you kept going?"

  "Do you see that as an accomplishment?"

  "Most people would have stopped dead."

  Alessandro turned up his hands. "What do you want from me?"

  "You have here quite a few students who are monarchists."

  "Of course we do. They don't study—they march, put up posters, and fight duels. I confess that I don't understand them, given that we already have a king."

  "They want to make him into a god."

  "He's too short."

  "That won't stop them."

  "Maybe not, but because of all that interbreeding, I think, he looks like a Calabrian hill dwarf. They have their work cut out for them."

  "And they'll make a lot of trouble on the way."

  "So?"

  "They have a fencing club. The twenty in the club have found a Jew in the Faculty of Law."

  "Considering how many Jews are in the Faculty of Law, that isn't very impressive, is it."

  "They talk about killing him."

  "Why?"

  "He's from Venice. His mother is German. They think he's disloyal."

  "To what?"

  "To Italy."

  "That's almost impossible. Is he?"

  "No. He's apolitical, and if he were political he would probably be quite unexceptional."

&n
bsp; "Why don't you help him?"

  "If one Jew comes to the aid of another, it won't matter."

  Alessandro was puzzled. The cloud of his breath died in the air.

  "They can always outnumber us, and they know it, but a Christian ... My friend lives on the Via Piave, number sixteen, top floor. Tonight they're going to push him out on the street and beat him."

  "What about the police?"

  "I went to them. They knew about it already, and they didn't care.

  "How is Lia connected to this? You know her, and he knows her, and you all seem to know each other.... She's a Jewess?"

  "Yes. Our friend's name is Raffaello Foa. They think that his father is a banker in league with the Austrians."

  "Is he?" Alessandro asked, closing his six books two at a time.

  "He's a butcher."

  "So why doesn't this Rafi tell that to the monarchists?"

  The other student smiled with a bitterness that Alessandro had never seen in someone so young. "It would make no difference," he said.

  The park was silent but for the slow burn of gently falling snow. Not far from where he lived was a gunsmith's shop, and Alessandro had often stared at the pistols, shotguns, and hunting equipment in the window, and he had once seen the gunsmith draw a pistol through the protective iron bars without troubling to unlock them.

  In the dark, the streets were deserted and the shutters were shut. The snow had driven everyone inside, and wood fires from a hundred chimneys made the air sweet with the smell of soft-woods from Finland and Russia.

  Alessandro was too scared to take much in. His peripheral vision had fled and his heart was running away with him when he raised his leg and kicked the glass with the heel of his boot. The window collapsed with a sound that Alessandro thought would be heard in Naples. He pulled a pistol through the bars and put it in his coat.

  "Walk calmly," he whispered to himself. No one came.

  As he vanished into the park he was still frightened, but now he knew he had a good chance of protecting Raffaello Foa, who should have either gotten his own gun or stayed in Venice. It would soon be over, and then, if he were lucky, Alessandro would go home and bury himself under his down quilt for at least fourteen hours. The next day, the sun would have melted the snow and would be evaporating the small streams that trickled over the cobblestones.