A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "I would not put them together."

  "Even if she looked to you like a woman who was tense, and lovely, and virtuous—a woman who loved, a woman whose life was one of restraint, but for whom a mixed-up trip to Alexandretta would be, perhaps, the kind of thing that makes restraint worth bearing, justifies it? What would you do for one of your sisters in that position?"

  Now the train was running across the marsh. The Irishwoman, whose name was Janet McCafrey, did not answer Alessandro directly, but her savage, red, tight, and beautifully crooked face composed itself into an alluring and patient smile.

  "The monks are practiced in precisely this kind of distinction," he added.

  "What did I do," she asked no one, "to get this man in my compartment?"

  "We have two beds," he noted, observing that her dress was tighter around her body than would be required to make her constantly aware of the idea or memory of an embrace. "And in regard to your guilt," he added, "in my profession, as in agriculture, neither guilt nor innocence has a place."

  The train was racing across golden fields once again. The bottle of mineral water knocked against the window now and then. It was sunny outside, and cool in their shaded compartment.

  "Nor, might I add, in mine. And let me say that I know we have two beds."

  "I understand," Alessandro said. He envisioned the long, slow, exciting ritual of their undressing for bed. He would endeavor to close his eyes or stare out the window, and she would disrobe within a foot of him, knowing that the very sound of her clothing would be more powerful than a hundred voluptuous nudes. Somehow, he would manage to get into bed, in the dark, and then he would lean over to speak to her, and she would have let her nightgown fall just, ever-so-slightly, a bit too much. And there they would be, parallel, rushing through the dark, caught in between the sheets, looking at one another's faces, aching to touch.

  THE TRAIN was long: two locomotives, two coal cars, four sleepers, eight passenger cars, two dining cars, a mail car, and the private carriage of an unknown aristocrat, bringing up the rear with a little platform upon which he was sitting in a maroon smoking-jacket. When the train rounded bends, one could see the locomotives, as busy as ever at the front, the shuttlecocks of Europe, rushing about here and there like crazed cats crisscrossing a garden in pursuit of voles.

  Now they had attained the steady speed that makes the landscape a thing of perfection and elevates the thoughts of someone observing it, but Alessandro was held closely to earth by the presence of Janet McCafrey, and thought of nothing but her. In railroad compartments, she mostly met fat-men who thought she was freakish because of her un-Italian, bird-like, Anglo-Irish gauntness, but Alessandro loved this sharp quality. He intended to put her off balance at first, to see her admirable intensity intensify. As the train sped along he leaned forward and said, "Tell me then, now that we seem to be sharing the same compartment, why Bucharest?"

  She clutched her chest with her right hand, paled, and became immobile. She stood up, as if to pull some sort of cord, and sank back in despair, for she had intended to go to Munich from Venice, and now she thought that she was rushing at seventy kilometers per hour toward Bucharest. "Bucharest?" she asked meekly. "Bucharest?"

  "Did I say Bucharest?" he replied. "That was a foolish mistake. Sorry."

  She closed her eyes and passed her left hand across her brow, sighing in relief.

  "I meant Budapest!"

  "Oh God!" she said, giving up hope.

  "Don't worry," Alessandro assured her, "we're on the track to Munich."

  She was not angry, but wary. She wondered who he was, and she knew that he liked her. "I suppose," she offered, "that precision is not one of your strong points," and then she gave him the same smile that she had used in accusing him of being a deaf mute—so challenging, so impudent, so inviting.

  "Perhaps not," he conceded, with a touch of feigned distress. "It's all the same to me—Budapest, Bucharest, Munich, Prague, Barcelona. I'm constantly on the move. All cities get to look alike, especially since my mission in each is the same."

  He became deliberately silent, and looked out the window. Eventually, she had to ask, and she did, delicately and with caution, "What is your mission?"

  "I'm a toothbrush salesman," he said, rifling through his haversack. While she sank back yet again in disappointment, he ignited. "We have a revolutionary dental cleaning instrument of a very elegant character that has been used primarily by the heads of the royal houses and that has yet to be brought to the general public. This instrument, while relatively expensive, is made of the best materials, will last a lifetime, applies the dentifrice in the gentlest and most effective manner, will not disturb the tooth enamel, and is comfortable to use." His hand settled inside the haversack on Enrico's tail brush, a duplicate of which he intended to find in Munich. It was a Viennese contraption twice as long as a man's hand and surrounded over half its long handle by bristles as thick as spaghetti projecting stiffly from it as far as a finger. Hanging from the end was a collection of vicious-looking scythe-like bladed hooks that, pulled gently through Enrico's tail, gave it a mesmerizing curl. At the base of the bristles was a broad serrated knife. The bristles themselves were covered with glistening black horse lanolin to which many kinds of things had clung.

  "I go from pharmacy to pharmacy," he said. "It's hard. Some people are put off by the modern design, they distrust modernity, but then I tell them that it is this that whitens the teeth of the King of England."

  He smiled proudly and pulled out the tail brush.

  She looked at it for a while and her eyes leapt from it, to him, to the door. Then she leaned forward. "Tell me something," she asked earnestly. "When did you escape, and what do you want?" Leaning back, she added, as dryly as could only an Irishwoman who has spent ten years issuing steamship tickets to impatient English aristocrats, "You can call me Nurse Janet."

  This made Alessandro laugh, and she joined him. The people in the next compartment rapped on the wall, and their muffled command came through the veneer in severe Plattdeutsch, "Laugh not in time of war!"

  "You know," she said, "I've never heard an Italian man laugh at himself. Are you sure you're Italian? What has happened to your pride?"

  "My pride," Alessandro said. "My pride. Let's see. I never had too much to start—I was too busy. Too much to see, too many fine things that have nothing to do with me." He hesitated. "Of late, I've deliberately taken whatever pride I had and led it to slaughter."

  Her eyes were green, and so animate now that it seemed that she was dancing. "Why?"

  "My father asked the same thing."

  She nodded, waiting for him to go on.

  "The war," he said. "Like an animal compelled by the seasons to engage in a course of behavior that it cannot understand, I feel directed to shed my skin, to dance, to burrow in the dirt, to behave like a fool. I don't know why, but something says to me, Abandon your pride, drop it, sink it, leave it, be foolish, be indiscreet, shame yourself. I really don't understand this, but the impulse is overwhelming and I'm going to honor it."

  "You're going to survive," she said.

  "I may not be able to avoid the trenches, but I'm going to change myself in whatever way is necessary so that I may walk out of them. That's what I intend."

  She sat back to observe her accidental companion. She would not have cared had she been on her way to Bucharest, and neither would have he. "What's your name?" she asked.

  "Alessandro Giuliani," he replied, just before a long blast of the steam whistle.

  THE TRAIN passed great and small cities and pushed on toward the mountains. The harvest, the sun, and the October light had made Italy a chain mail of fields, their richness and tranquillity shattered only by the railway, and even then, after the trains had passed through, contentment would close-in the way cold blue water fills the trough made by an oar.

  The Italian conductor would be replaced in Bolzano by an Austrian Schlafwagenmeister. He therefore felt keenly his vanishing p
restige, and he eyed Alessandro and Janet with eyes that could not have been shiftier or more wary had they been given to a weasel. His peaked hat and waxed mustache exaggerated the effect. Here were a man and a woman of sexual age, together in connubial quarters, unmarried, and perhaps even unacquainted.

  "Does anyone wish to exercise the right of complaint?" he asked.

  They stared at him blankly.

  "It is within my competence to adjust malfeasance and to see to the comfort and dignity of the passengers, for example, while the train is in the field of maneuver at Bolzano."

  When they made no requests, he punched their tickets, made a nervous bow, and backed out the door, knocking a fat Austrian woman against the windows.

  "What do you do when you're not selling toothbrushes or making geography mistakes?" Janet asked as they knifed through a village where the bells were ringing and the birds flying around the steeples to wait them out.

  "I will have been delayed by military service, but I was about to take a position as a lecturer at the university in Bologna. I'm supposed to explain to undergraduates, while in the process of discovery myself, what is beautiful and why. Of course, neither I nor anyone else can do it, but I can try, and to do so I have to know the theories of beauty from Aristotle's forward, and before I die I'm supposed to come up with one of my own."

  "Well," she said, "it's a nice toothbrush."

  "Thank you. I could cite one of the many laws of contexts and contrasts. For example, associated with a cavalryman's saddle, rifle, bayonet, and curry combs, let us say, pictured in brown and golden tones hanging haphazardly on a worn stable door, with the smooth lines of the horse itself vanishing off the canvas, and the cavalryman, in his bright colors, standing to the center, it might in fact be beautiful, but if in association with, for example, your masses of red hair, your white teeth, your extraordinarily beautiful mouth, and your bare shoulders, it would, of course, be ugly.

  "That's all in reference to me or to you. It might have a better chance if seen in another eye. An octopus is a hideous, baggy, slimy, thoroughly disgusting creature. Which is worse, its sharp beak hidden within folds of soft flesh, its pod-like eyes, its flaccid sack, or its bumpy tentacles? Some have cited it as proof that God did not create the universe, but, at a distance, swimming smoothly through the water, it's as graceful as a prima ballerina. Sectioned under a microscope, it presents patterns of inexhaustible brilliance. And to an octopus of the opposite sex, or even to an adolescent squid who needs someone after whom to model himself, it can be handsome or beautiful, as the case may be.

  "Throw in some Latin and Greek; magnify, enlarge, draw back now and then to get your bearings; and show that, despite context, position, and point of apprehension, nothing, in fact, is relative, and all beauty is absolute; and you have the basis for a lecture.

  "That's what I do."

  "It's totally unnecessary," she said.

  "No one knows better than I that it's all here, and need not be explained or interpreted—just seized. What we see from the window of the train as it slowly alters our perspective and speeds across different registers of color and form; the light in this bottle of water; the rhythm of the engines; the way the clouds are pushed on waves of wind; you yourself, Nurse Janet, your entire body, apprehended in toto, part by part, in the light, in the dark; your smile, the way you move your eyes and lean upon your arm; the coincidence of colors in your dress and in your hair; the very angles of your teeth; that they glisten with moisture; your long fingers as they rest in your palms, like the radians of a nautilus; the pace of your breathing; the sweetness, I presume, of your breath, and the taste of your mouth. Such things, and I have only brushed the surface, render my profession totally unnecessary, and I know it."

  "Lock the door," she said.

  He leaned over and flipped the lock.

  As if it had been timed by nature, they both stood to make a quick leap to the other's bench, and collided forcefully, still standing, in the middle. The train swayed first one way and then the other as it rounded a turn. She was pushed into him initially, and then he was pushed into her, and when the force of the turn pressed them together they magnified it by clasping tighter.

  They remained standing as the train climbed into the hills, kissing until they were stupefied. Then they sank down, touching only lightly, and they kissed for at least an hour. She surfaced as if from an undertow. "It's the war, isn't it?" she asked, and then he took her back under. They were on the high ridge that rises between war and peace, and, like alpinists, they were intoxicated by the magnitude of the country below.

  They both lost track of time, but after the change of engines in Bolzano, where they pulled the curtain down, it began to get dark. To the north, in country that Alessandro knew well, the mountains were a rose-colored gold along the snow line, and the Dolomite rock spires, rising from darkened meadows, were red. As the train ascended into the ice world, Alessandro and Janet flushed with heat of their own making. Their eyes were glazed, their hair looked as if it had been disheveled in a hurricane, and they said things that were far different from words.

  Before the moon came up, someone rapped on the door, but they hardly heard it. The Austrian sleeping-car master, who had boarded while they were semi-conscious in Bolzano, announced that dinner was ready.

  When they entered the dining car, heads turned. They looked as if they had been in the sun for several hours, and they walked together and carried themselves unmistakably.

  THE MENU offered only ten schnitzels.

  "What am I supposed to do?" Janet asked. "I don't like eggs, I don't like bread crumbs, and I don't like veal."

  "How have you survived in Venice for six years?" Alessandro asked.

  The waiter arrived with a towel draped over his mallet-like forearm. "I'm sorry to announce," he said, "that, due to the war, we have not Wiener Schnitzel, Salzburger Schnitzel, Heimlich Schnitzel, Schweizer Schnitzel, Fest Schnitzel, Schlange Schnitzel, Nelke Schnitzel, Unverwandt Schnitzel, Ganzlich Schnitzel, and Auberst Schnitzel."

  "What do you have?"

  "Chicken and potatoes."

  "How do you cook the chicken?"

  "Over a flame, sir," the waiter replied, frigidly.

  "Directly?"

  "No, sir. In a pot of heisses Wasser."

  "Boiled chicken?"

  The waiter was rent by conflicting defiance, disgust, shame, and pride. "At the front, men are dying."

  "I'm sorry," Alessandro said. "Bring us whatever there is. What comes with the boiled chicken?"

  "Potatoes, as I have indicated..."

  Janet held out her index finger and smiled viciously, but the waiter did not understand that he had not actually indicated any potatoes.

  "A small Salat. Plenty of Mineralwasser. Dessert is your choice—rhubarb flan, or festival torte. Rhubarb flan speaks..." He was taken by the shoulder as the dining car master walked by and whispered something to him, leaving Alessandro and Janet with his last words echoing in their ears: "Rhubarb flan speaks..."

  "And the festival torte," he continued, with a sigh, "is sugar and flour with a dash of cocoa."

  "We'll have the talking flan."

  "Italian swine," he said under his breath.

  Janet heard it. "I'm Irish," she stated.

  Alter this aggression, Alessandro no longer felt guilty about wanting to eat while men were dying at the front. He remembered as well that he soon might be doing the same, or, at the very least, killing them. "Bring the festival torte," he commanded.

  After the waiter left, Janet said, "If this were England, he'd pee in our soup."

  "He's German and I'm Italian," Alessandro offered. "He already did."

  "Thank God Ireland is neutral."

  "On which side?"

  "England's."

  "Italy may not enter the war after all," Alessandro told her. "We have no real interest in it. Although we make noise, we always make noise, and seldom does anything come of it. If we do declare war, whether against t
he Central Powers or the Entente, it will be at the end, perhaps next spring. We might send a battle fleet to sea and fire a few shots before the armistice. That's the Italian ethos."

  "It's not the English ethos," she said. "And it's certainly not the German ethos."

  "Nor the Russian," he added, playing intently with his knife. "The many millions of them are capable of inflicting great damage, not least on themselves."

  Outside Innsbruck the train slowed to a walk as it passed through an enormous barbed wire barricade and into a vast military area. Alessandro rose in his chair, surprised that a civilian train would be allowed in an armed camp. The cars were closely watched by guards in sandbagged enclosures all the way along the route, and electric lights were focused on the undercarriages, sending up a strange white glow that suggested not railway ties and a gravel trackbed but the entry to another world.

  The slow pace of the train enabled Alessandro to observe carefully this encampment of the Imperial Army. For as far as he could see west toward the mountains that formed one wall of the valley of the Ruetzbach were lines of tents, rows of wagons and artillery pieces, and fires that stretched down the long alleys like flaming shrubbery.

  Dozens of men were gathered around each blaze, at least a hundred fires ran down each row, and the rows did not stop appearing as the train filed past—twenty, thirty, forty, fifty; they kept on coming. Alessandro calculated that the encampment held a hundred thousand men or more.

  He felt a chill when he saw this, as if he were looking through a window to the future. And just when the chill was over he turned in his seat to look out the opposite rank of windows. There, too, the casual diners had been stunned by the new world, for there, too, were yet another hundred thousand men in a city of tents and fires.

  Most of the soldiers were boys only somewhat younger than he. Their hair was closely cropped, and their big, awkward, adolescent faces were appropriate for sawyers or guides in an Alpine village, or for the discontented sons of grocers in those cities big enough for churches and squares. The ones in the guard posts, who watched the train as it passed through their encampment, had the expression of miners looking out from the dark. It was not just that the floodlights reflected back by the shining undercarriage almost blinded them, but that they had been completely removed from the world they had known. In gray coats and high boots, burdened with rifles and ammunition, they appeared to be silent, fated, and strange.