A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  Number 16 Via Piave was a dark building with not a single light visible through its shuttered windows. As Alessandro stood silently before it he heard a distant thunderstorm. Thunder hardly ever came in snow, and the thought of lightning bolts striking blindly through cold gray air made Alessandro look up. The sky held no flashes, but only the rumble of thunder, and everything rattled. Alessandro felt his chest vibrate with each concussion, and though he would hear them many times again, lashing out from hidden places in the snow-choked air as if they were calling him and his generation to things so stunning and unexpected that no one had even begun to imagine them, the concussions were so far away and so unworldly that they seemed not to be real.

  He felt his way to the stairs, and as he walked up the four flights cracks of thunder shook the skylight. The higher he rose, the lighter it got, and at the top the whitened glass, brushed by snow and vibrating like a snare drum, lit everything in its glow.

  The door was answered by a tall young man of Alessandro's age, whose cheekbones were so high and eyes so slanted that it made Alessandro think of Tamerlane. The very height of the man (he had to bend his head in the doorway) and his expression made Alessandro wonder why he, Alessandro, had presumed to protect him, for he looked the match of all the monarchists and anarchists in Italy.

  "Are you Italian?" Alessandro asked.

  "Yes, I'm Italian. Are you?"

  "You look like one of the Golden Horde," Alessandro told him.

  "Magyar," Rafi Foa answered, "and some German, and some Russian, and all Jew, if that's what you're driving at, or even if it isn't."

  "I wasn't driving at it."

  In Rafi's room a wood fire burned in a small terra cotta stove. Books and notebooks were spread out between two kerosene lamps on a tremendous library table. A bed was in one corner. Apart from a bookshelf and a chair, the room held nothing else.

  "You can sit in the chair," Rafi said after they had introduced themselves.

  Rafi had heard nothing of the monarchists, and though he took note of what Alessandro said he was neither frightened nor surprised.

  "Do you know him?" Alessandro asked, referring to the go-between. "He had blue eyes, straight brown hair, and a red face. He looked English."

  "I don't know him. Perhaps he's a monarchist."

  "How do you know Lia?"

  "I met her brother a few years ago, when he was stationed near Venice. We included him in our minyan—prayers. I stayed with the Bellatis in Rome, once when he was there and the other time when he was in Sardinia. These military people get around."

  They heard the sound of people coming up the stairs.

  "What are you going to do?" Alessandro asked. "I have this." From his coat he withdrew a hunting pistol with a long barrel and a heavy handle. "It isn't loaded, but they won't know."

  "Unless they happen to have one, too," Rafi said. "Take it with you. Go to the stairs that lead to the roof."

  "What about you?"

  "God will protect me."

  "God?" Alessandro asked in amazement. Whoever was on the stairs had almost reached the top floor, too close now for Alessandro to escape unseen. "They think your father is in league with the Austrians."

  "My father?"

  "Yes. They think he's a banker."

  From a drawer in the library table Rafi took a prayer shawl that he threw over his shoulders. Except in engravings, Alessandro had never seen a Jew at prayer. For him it was as startling as the approach of the monarchists.

  "My father is a butcher," Rafi said, "in league with the housewives of Venice."

  "Aren't you going to fight?" Alessandro asked.

  Rafi opened a prayer book, stood to his full height, and kissed it. Just as they banged on the door, he began to pray, and as he started to sway back and forth Alessandro stepped behind the curtain that served as the door of the closet.

  Shattering the cast-iron latch, five young men broke into the room. Flanked by the flickering kerosene lamps, uttering his prayers, looming over them, Rafi frightened them more than they frightened him, but they had come with a plan, and would overcome their fear, seize him, and strike him down. "Are you Raffaello Foa?" they asked, as if his confirmation would justify what they were going to do. Continuing in his strange prayer, he refused to answer.

  Alessandro knew that they would attack the material before they would touch the flesh. They would strip him of his prayer shawl and cap, and when he was like them and they were no longer afraid, punish him for having made them fear.

  They scattered the books and tore them in pieces. Before this was over, someone had grabbed the shawl and ripped it away. Rafi refused to look at them even when they began to hit him. They held their breath and punched him as hard as they could. They battered his chest, his arms, and his head.

  He remained standing, repeating one phrase over and over. Propped against the table, he refused to go down. His face was covered with blood, and when they hit him the blood flew off him and spattered against the walls. They hit him in the back, the kidneys, in his ribs, his genitals. They kicked his legs. But he refused to go down.

  "Jewish bankers run this country!" one of them shouted. "But no more, no more."

  Rafi was still muttering, his eyes closed, when one of the students who were beating him took from his coat a sheathed saber and began to strike him with it as if he were hitting a canvas bag hung from a beam in a fencing atelier. Rafi twirled, spitting his own blood, and fell over the table, where he lay between the lamps, still moving and still muttering.

  As the student with the saber grasped it with both hands and slowly raised it, Alessandro emerged from behind and hit him on the back of the head with a sideways stroke of the pistol, opening his scalp and knocking him to the floor.

  With the pistol in both hands, Alessandro backed around the table. When he cocked the hammer, the click echoed from the walls and ceiling.

  He thought they would leave, but one of them slowly opened his coat, put his hand inside, and took out his own pistol. Alessandro didn't know what to do. The thunder was barely audible and the wind had come up just enough to shriek a little in the cracks of the windows. He held.

  "The Jews are allied with the..."

  "Shut up!" Alessandro shouted, tensing so that he looked as if he were about to fire. "The problem with the Jews, isn't it, is that they aren't allied with anyone."

  The thunder persisted. Alessandro had no idea that thunder, muffled in wild snow, sounded exactly like artillery. He held his position because it was all he could do, and the monarchists backed down.

  YOUNG SINGERS of little experience and old ones of poor voice often found themselves in Bologna in a theater that was supported by huge trusses and timbers arrayed against its bulging outer walls. The architectural decorations on the façade of this doomed opera house had been so worn down by wind and water that the devils were toothless, the gargoyles faceless, and the cornices round, but Italy had always been full of buildings that seemed just about to fall down, and this one, in its timber girdle, waited until Alessandro had left the city.

  Three times a week, Rossini and Verdi marshaled sufficient force and beauty to shut the students up and bring them to the kind of rapt attention that the singers of La Scala thought the natural state of mankind. When one singer questioned another about a run in this theater, the query was, "For how long did you clear the air?" meaning for how many minutes in his aria was he able to rid the sky of the paper airplanes that crossed and collided over the orchestra in a traffic unlike any that had ever been seen on earth. They were sometimes ten and twenty layers deep, they would meander in circles, or zigzag, a hundred or more sailing about unimpeded.

  Everyone kept his eye on his own craft or on a favorite. As the planes darted through the huge empty space, the singers looked out not only upon the missiles themselves but upon a thousand boys whose heads, as if in a completely anarchic tennis match, moved back and forth in many different directions—and not only back and forth, but slowly and graduall
y down. Singing there was like performing in a hospital for nervous diseases.

  On occasion, one or more students who knew the lyrics and were gifted with powerful voices stood in their seats and competed with whatever wretch was unlucky enough to be onstage. Whether it was done as a compliment or in derision was immaterial. The result was the same. Worse, perhaps, was the unfolding of several hundred newspapers, signaling an insulting neutrality. Bombardment by eggs and vegetables, shouted insults, and the occasional shoe that landed next to a terrified soprano, were, of course, unambiguous.

  But should a young singer with the heart and courage to face these things and keep on singing, sing well, a thousand boys as unruly as animals and as jumpy as unbroken horses or caffeinated bulls on a festival day, would suddenly become still. The house electrified, beyond the footlights a thousand faces would show expressions of sadness, longing, and desire, and some would sparkle back at the lights, in tracks that ran down the cheeks from bright eyes that caught the light. And when the aria ended, after a few seconds of silence the students would erupt into a roar of appreciation that put the audiences of major opera houses to shame.

  After a lively overture with an orchestral signature attributable mainly to the fact that theatrical impresarios have known for ages that adolescents can be quieted by hunting horns, the curtain rose, crushing several paper gliders in its folds. An extraordinary painted backdrop glowed in the light. Giotto's blues and Caravaggio's shadows had been united to portray a tranquil forest in neither night nor day but, rather, in a condition of the spirit. In combination with the overture, the weak and dream-like blue, the clouds of dark green that marked the tops of the trees, and the motile and confusing shadows, several forms of art kept the students as quiet as the dead.

  But not long after a group of obese 'hunters' had stepped from the trees and begun to sing, Alessandro noticed that the white objects had begun to glide down from the highest balconies. In the orchestra, with contempt for the fire laws, two students had set up a brazier and were grilling small cubes of meat. Alessandro leaned against what had once been the velvet-covered rail of the middle balcony, and smiled. He was thinking of the girl in the Villa Medici. Although she was too young, she was French, he didn't know her name, she had been surrounded by protective companions, and their encounter had been like a dream, she was more familiar to him than someone he had known all his life. When their eyes met he had felt immense gravity, as if fifty years had been compressed into ten seconds. He wasn't infatuated with her, but instead he loved her so quietly that he thought he would soon forget her, although when he considered the prospect of forgetting her his love for her grew, and this made him remember that heavy blizzards start as gentle and persistent snow.

  In her absence, and in the absence of anyone like her, he was drawn to many things that, in being beautiful, were her allies—the blue of the stage-set in the floodlights, the grace of a cat as it turned its small lion-like face to question a human movement, a fire that blazed from within the dark of a blacksmith's shop or a baker's and caught his eye as he passed, a single tone arising from a cathedral choir to shock a jaded congregation with its unworldly beauty, the mountaintops as snow was lashed from them by blue winds, the perfect and uncontrived smile of a child. Upon such observations, because they came so thick and full, he had begun to build an arsenal of uncoordinated aesthetic principles. Though the system that was forming was not well in order, he trusted that as things progressed he would watch the images run together.

  At the end of their song the hunters went offstage in disappointment, and then came several scenes that had not been com posed for an audience that rocked back and forth in its seats like stir-crazed leopards in a zoo.

  Alessandro leaned forward, eyes fixed upon the illuminated painting. As the air passed over the candles in the footlights and their flames struggled against it, differing light was thrown upon the rich forest.

  "I've been tapping your shoulder for at least a minute," Rafi said to Alessandro.

  Alessandro turned to squint into the darkness.

  "You look rather dumb when you listen to music."

  "You're well now?" Alessandro asked.

  "Yes. I even played tennis. Can we talk here?" Rafi asked, as if it were a regular theater.

  "We could fight a duel and no one would notice," Alessandro answered, "but let's go outside."

  When they were sitting on a long flight of white marble steps from which they could see far out over the countryside surrounding Bologna, Alessandro asked, "Why didn't you fight?"

  In the last year of his legal studies, Rafi could do anything he pleased with either a question or an answer. "I did fight," he said. "I fought as hard as I could, and I carry the wounds from it."

  " They don't."

  "That isn't my concern."

  "A strange way of fighting."

  "It binds me to what I seek."

  "I suppose it does," Alessandro told him, "and if I hadn't been there with a pistol that I stole by smashing a store window, you would have been bound so close to what you seek that to see anything you would have had to look out."

  "True," Rafi said, infuriatingly.

  "Why haven't you learned to strike back?"

  "As you may know," Rafi said, "the streets of Venice are made of water. Fights there tend to be very short, because after a few moments one of the combatants usually ends up in the canal. When I was young I was thrown off bridges and embankments a number of times."

  "Look," said Alessandro, who had never been in a real fight in his life, "I can show you how to acquit yourself properly in physical combat." He considered the object of conversion. "You're tremendous, but you're probably not very strong. Size itself is unimportant: you have to exercise. Why are you smiling?"

  "I'm rather strong, you see."

  "Oh, I doubt it," the smaller of the two said pompously.

  "For six months of the year I study law, but in the other six I work for my father."

  "Slicing cutlets doesn't make a Hercules."

  "My father doesn't have a butcher shop with a glass window and a display case. He's a wholesaler. His warehouse is the size of the Arsenal and he has a hundred and fifty employees. Most are cutters. Since cutting demands great skill and I was supposed to be a lawyer, there never was any reason for me to learn how to cut, so I carry and hang meat."

  "How much?"

  "Quarters."

  "What do they weigh?"

  "A hundred kilograms or more. You wear a blue coat with a hood. Before you carry, you flip the hood so your hair doesn't get bloody. You take the quarter off the hook, mount it on your back, and walk. If it's in the hold of an oceangoing ship you may walk for ten minutes before you get to the warehouse. Then you flip the carcass over your shoulder, hold it steady, and hang it. The meat can also come stacked. In that case you have to pick it up from the ground and hoist it onto your shoulders."

  "So why didn't you pick up the monarchists and throw them down the stairs?"

  "I've never done that sort of thing."

  "Let me show you."

  "All right," Rafi said, "show me."

  "On the weekend," Alessandro answered, "if the weather is good."

  They shook hands.

  BECAUSE HE hadn't had the slightest notion of how to do it, Alessandro spent the next few days figuring out how to toughen up Rafi Foa, and on Sunday morning the two of them stood by the railroad tracks as a train approached from out of the winter sun. Not wanting to be seen by the engineers, they hid in the brush.

  "What are we going to do?" Rafi asked.

  "First we jump the train," Alessandro replied. "We climb onto the roof and run down to the caboose."

  "Why?"

  "So the men in the caboose will chase us over the roofs of the cars while the train is in motion."

  "What if they catch us?"

  "They won't: that's the purpose of the exercise."

  "On a moving train, where can we possibly go to get away from them?"

/>   "Ten kilometers out, a railroad bridge goes over the river. Imagine how surprised they'll be when we jump!"

  "Imagine how surprised I'll be when we jump. It's January."

  "Just do exactly as I do."

  "Have you ever done this before?" Rafi asked apprehensively as the train rumbled forward, the sound of its engine shaking everything around them and penetrating their chests so that their voices vibrated.

  "Of course," Alessandro said.

  They ran alongside and caught on to a cattle car. "Climb up, as if it were a ladder," Alessandro yelled over the noise of the wheels. They went straight up the open boards until they found themselves at the beginning of a rounded, slippery roof on which handholds were nonexistent.

  "Now what?" Rafi screamed.

  "Work your way to the corner," Alessandro said, improvising. They moved to the corner. "Keep your hands on the edges of the roof and go up while you walk on the cross beam."

  "How can you put your feet there?" Rafi shouted as they were tossed around above the tracks. "Its not big enough and it's too high."

  "It's big enough. You have to bend." Alessandro began to move across the end of the car. His hands were cut on the edges of the filthy metal roof, and it took every muscle in his body to keep from being thrown into the maw between cars. Rafi followed.

  The noise was tremendous—thunderous booms when empty cars passed over uneven spots in the rail, steel grinding against steel as wheels strained against the track, the bedlamite rattling of unsprung empty boxcars moving at a rapid clip.

  Smoke and cinders swept along the top of the train. Half the time Alessandro and Rafi had to shut their eyes, and the other half they spent in irritating tears. They could hardly breathe. If they had fallen between the cars, the dragging and cutting would have made them unrecognizable.