A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "As much as it pains me," Guariglia said, "we'd better go separately. The hills are going to be thick with deserters. Wait a few minutes so you'll be carried north a ways."

  "We could stay, Guariglia."

  "No. They shoot everybody. It's like pulling ticks. They'd question us for an hour and put us up against a wall. Fuck them, fuck all of them. I'm going to my children." He climbed over the rail. "Maybe we'll make it."

  Guariglia jumped away from the ship. He hit the water with hardly a sound and disappeared in the waves. When he surfaced he had already turned toward shore and was swimming strongly. The way he moved reminded Alessandro of the way an animal swims in a flooded river that has taken his home.

  The bandsman walked to the stern, talking to himself like a patient in a hospital for the terminally ill.

  Alessandro stood with his hands on the rail. He had no good way to gauge the time. If he had counted, he would have counted too fast. If he had tried to mark the progress of the moon from peak to peak, he would have been mesmerized for too long. So he simply waited for the boat to come even with a stretch of beach that looked wide and clear.

  The sea was no longer like a washboard, for the moon had stroked it into rambling waves that said what the sea was supposed to say in moonlight, and these gave the cattle boat a lovely motion as it slid down their shallow troughs. Alessandro climbed up and sat on the rail.

  He looked out. The sea was marbled with foam and drawn into molten hills and valleys that were cool and smooth and flooded with the moon. Soon the moon would be behind the mountains and he would be crossing the rings of fire. He stepped outward into space and felt the lovely light caress him with affection. He hadn't known that anything as cold and clear as moonlight could be so full of promise, and as he fell it seemed to him that his hands clawed a trail of white sparks through the air, but these were the stars.

  VI. STELLA MARIS

  THE SEA was warm, and the surf was unusually high for the Adriatic at that time of year. The wind coming off the hills, dry, full of smoke, and seemingly driven by the moon, knocked the crests from the waves as if they were as light as snow. In this kind of beautiful water a swimmer might want to drown, and the heart of the temptation was not so much the quality of sensation but the way the water moved, endlessly rocking, endlessly meeting the wind and falling back, endlessly engaged in a conversation wiser than any act of will.

  Loosely churning half asleep in the white sound of the waves, Alessandro stopped swimming, but the very moment that his thoughts turned to the possibility of release he was picked up by a whip-like stroke and slapped against the sand as if he were a piece of meat thrown onto a marble slab in a fancy butcher shop.

  With the wind knocked out of him, he stood to fight the undertow. Keeping his balance, he emerged on an empty beach, in a warm wind that had dried his clothing by the time he put on his boots and that promised to dry the boots themselves before he crossed the first ring of fire.

  The walking was easy. The grain had been harvested and the fields were flat and unplowed, with golden stalks littering the ground in a soft mat that glowed in the moonlight. The olive trees had been pruned, and he moved through them as if on a garden path.

  After half an hour he came to the first line of fire. From the cattle boat these lines had looked like luminous golden cables braided across the fields. It had seemed that they could easily have been straddled, though it was possible even from the sea to make out the thick curtain of smoke that rose from sullen flame.

  Alessandro was surprised to discover that the fires were taller than a man, and burned in a solid unbroken front for as far as he could see. In the distance, figures in shadow appeared to be tending the slowly moving wall of flame. They held torches, because they were present not to control the fire but merely to spur it on.

  The line, though not drawn by a straight-edge, was remarkably even, because the wind was remarkably even. It was so hot and so bright that Alessandro could hardly get close to it.

  He wondered if, just the way that one can pass one's finger quickly through a candle flame, he might pass through the fire unscathed. At first he made tentative approaches, with his hands in front of his eyes, but it was too hot to bear, and as the wind pushed the fire at him he had to retreat.

  When he looked to see what the farmers were doing he saw that every now and then one of the torches would speed toward the flame and disappear into it, and sometimes the wall would spit out a drop of fire, a torch borne by a man.

  Alessandro started to run. He held his breath, jumped at the flame, and in an instant he was on the other side. He felt no pain. His clothes had not caught fire. He had not even felt the heat in the midst of the flame, but only before and after it.

  On the other side, a new field stretched toward the mountains. Though the ground was charred and covered with ash, the way was smooth. He would get through a line and raise dust and ashes for half an hour until he approached another, which he would take as he had taken the one before it. Each time he crossed he was encouraged, and each time he crossed he was closer to the dark mountain that he was using as a guide. At first the moon had been directly over it, but now was far to the right. Some of the River Guard, Alessandro guessed, not knowing how to move across open country, would use the moon as their compass and make an oddly curved track.

  The last fire-line was in a rocky pasture on the side of the mountain itself. Because the ground was not as even or well tended as the fields on the coastal plain, the line was broken and Alessandro could have crossed in the breaks. Instead, he went for the highest wall of flame, which now he could hardly see, for the sun was coming up behind him and hid the fire even as it showed the smoke. He went through it like a spirit, without closing his eyes. Now only the mountains lay between him and Rome.

  IN THE Gran Sasso d'ltalia are summits of almost three thousand meters. Compared to the Alps, they are minor, but not for someone who must go among them with neither food nor blankets. Though Alessandro had to cross more roads and rail lines than he had expected, these were empty but for occasional farmers in the far distance, moving so slowly next to an ox or a donkey that Alessandro could not tell if they were coming or going. Once, a train of empty boxcars rattled down a rusty track, pushed by an engine that seemed half dismantled. Alessandro was tempted to jump aboard, for it was heading west, more or less, but he knew that half the soldiers of the River Guard would seize upon this easy way to get home, and that military police watched freight trains with great interest.

  He surveyed a few towns from the hillsides above them but never went in for food. Near one little village perched at the top of a rock in a manner that seemed offensively defensive even to a soldier on the run, the bakers had been baking and the smell of hot fresh bread was almost his undoing, but Alessandro kept walking.

  He skirted lakes bordered by rocky outcroppings, and passed over boulder-covered hills and through glades in the forest where possibly no one had ever been. His one salvation was the pure water that ran in ice-cold streams from the lakes, for when he was hungry he knelt down and drank until he felt satisfied. Then he would force himself to drink until he was bloated, after which he could walk for several hours without thinking of food. The land he put behind him, the altitude he gained, and the delight of crossing open country brought the kind of rapture he had known on his rides between Rome and Bologna.

  As he crossed the Gran Sasso he was nearly overcome by a steadily mounting desire for women. He was as deeply in need of a woman's embrace as an animal is in need of salt. The equation, so long out of balance, cried for restitution. At times he half floated over the mountains, summoning the memory of almost every woman he had ever known, of all the nudes in paintings subject to his precise and vexing recollection, of the poignant and charged encounters on the streets and in parks, theaters, and lecture halls, where one sees the woman for whom one has to have been born, and then feels the deft and overpowering pain of circumstance as it draws her away, because the train must be
caught, dinner is at a certain time, or the store that sells a particular kind of kitchen implement will close in half an hour.

  On the morning of his third day without food, Alessandro had crossed the Gran Sasso and was sitting on a bed of pine needles above a small lake. The wind rushed through the trees and he was drunk on stream water and staring out over the lake. In this condition, he expected that some beauty would appear from nowhere and take him in her arms. He was not surprised, therefore, to hear soft footsteps behind him, and a jingling that sounded like bracelets. He breathed deeply and shut his eyes, and then a thousand sheep and half a dozen dogs came flooding through the forest, bumping up against the trees to scratch, and nibbling at inedible pine cones. They soon surrounded Alessandro so that all he could see was wool.

  A FERTILE meadow of untouched grass lay on both sides of the stream that fed the lake. It was as big as a small town, and no sheep had been near it for a year. Dogs watched the flock from miniature bluffs upon which they perched like models of the Sphinx, and the shepherds camped on the lakeshore as they waited for the sheep to fatten.

  Of the thousand sheep, four hundred were to be driven to Rome for slaughter. The three shepherds had argued for months about the best means to accomplish this. Should two go on the long drive, and leave only one to watch over six hundred sheep? On the other hand, one man could not expect to drive four hundred animals over rough country for sixty kilometers without losing half or more. The only solution was to get someone else.

  They didn't know Alessandro, they found his speech hard to understand, and he admitted that he knew nothing about sheep, but he was willing to accompany them to the Mattatoio in Rome. There, after a glass of wine with his companion, and the simulated splitting of shares, Alessandro had only to cross the Tiber and he would be home.

  "I don't like the idea," the oldest shepherd said to the other two, speaking across a campfire that blazed higher than a man's waist. It was the middle of September, they would have to leave in a few days, and at two thousand meters light snow sometimes fell at night, only to be burned away by a hot sun the next morning.

  "We've been through this a hundred times, Quagliagliarello," said Roberto, a man of Alessandro's age, who was to go with Alessandro to Rome. "We can't do it with only three of us."

  "But he's a deserter."

  Alessandro's eyes shot back and forth crossing the flames to follow the point of view.

  "So what. He was in for two years. What did you do?"

  "We raise sheep for the army."

  "We raise sheep because that's our business."

  The old shepherd looked about. He hated to argue, because other people were always much faster than he, and confounded everything he said. "We raise sheep because that's our business," he stated.

  "That's what I said," argued Roberto.

  "Well, it is our business."

  "All right, Quagliagliarello. He was in the army for two years. What have you done?"

  "I raise sheep because it's my business."

  "What's more important, defense of the country or business?"

  "You're trying to trap me."

  "Answer either way. I don't care."

  "Business. Business is more important."

  "Then he'll help in our business."

  "But he's a deserter."

  "So what?"

  "What's more important, business or defense of the country?"

  "You tell me," the younger one demanded.

  "Business!"

  "So why do you ask?"

  "Because he's a deserter."

  "So what?"

  "So, what's more important, business or the defense of the country?"

  "Business," Roberto answered.

  "That's what you said."

  "That's what I say."

  "Yes."

  "But he's a deserter."

  "So what?"

  "So, what's more important..." This went on until the fire had burned down sufficiently to require the third shepherd, a mute by the name of Modugno, to throw on more logs.

  As soon as they blazed up, Quagliagliarello knitted his brows and turned to Roberto. "I don't like it," he said.

  "Why not?" Roberto answered.

  "He's a deserter."

  Roberto was writing a letter to his sister. He kept on writing even as he argued with Quagliagliarello. "So what," he answered mechanically.

  "What's more important?" Quagliagliarello asked.

  "Business or the defense of the country?" Roberto continued.

  "Business."

  "Right."

  "But he's a deserter."

  "So what," Roberto said, moving on to another page. It was easy to argue with Quagliagliarello, if you had patience, and if you could pronounce his name.

  Alessandro crawled into a sheepskin sack and turned away from the fire. They were camped on a small sandbar that jutted into the lake, and as the fire died down he could see the stars without the intrusion of wavy air or flashing smoke. The argument between Roberto and Quagliagliarello had slowed until it sounded like a ritual incantation, and the wind was cold and dry.

  WHEN THEY moved through the mountains toward Rome they moved at the pace of the sheep, and the sheep moved at the pace of the clouds, the swaying of trees, and all the other things in nature, except lightning.

  The beauty of the lakes, the forest, and the stretches of tranquil blue sky gently took the army out of Alessandro. For weeks he heard nothing but the wind, the bleating of sheep, and the regular overturning and knocking together of the small rocks kicked about by the herd.

  Hawks circling on invisible rivers of air never saw fit to swoop down as long as the shepherds flanked the lambs. So attuned to the sound of the wind and its slightest variations was Alessandro that had the hawks descended he would have heard them, and he would have been where they were going to land, ready to use his stick.

  The only time Roberto and Alessandro disagreed was once when they came to a small lake, far beyond L'Aquila, where Alessandro had wanted to halt on the eastern side and Roberto brought the sheep around to the western. Though they were too far apart to shout across the water, their dispute was about how to look at the light, for Alessandro wanted to see the world gilded as sunlight flooded over the lake, to feel the heat on his face, to be surrounded by glare, but Roberto wanted to keep his eyes clear as the sun penciled-in every rigid and perfect detail of the hills. He stood watching the gulls on the lake. They were whiter than a glacier. In the stars, clouds, and wind, Alessandro hoped to be able to restore what he had lost, for beyond the disintegration and the glare, by the tenets and faith of the West, were clarity, reconstitution, and love.

  The closer they came to Rome the more towns and farms they had to skirt lest the sheep graze in a field yet to be harvested or find diversion in narrow streets. Where they were unable to break out over open country they held by rivers and streams and sometimes passed near a village, all four hundred sheep forging ahead as if they knew where they were going.

  One morning, as they looked out from a forest on the crest of a mountain, they saw Rome silently straddling the Tiber, fresh, pale, and without mass. In the eastern light ten thousand roofs flashed like the refractive scales of a fish as its stripes cloud into a dying rainbow when it is pulled from the sea.

  They came down past Subiaco, San Vito Romano, and Gallicano nel Lazio, and entered the city from the south. Although sheep were often driven through the center of Rome, two men could not hope to keep a large flock from breaking up in the maze of streets. Alessandro and Roberto marched their animals down the Via Ardeatina until they got to the Aurelian Wall, which they followed west. They stopped to ask a soldier what day it was.

  "It's the fifth," the soldier answered from the top of the wall, where he was standing with a rifle slung from his shoulder.

  "Of October?"

  "Where have you been?"

  They didn't bother to answer his question, for they had another of their own. "What day?"

  "I t
old you."

  "Not number, day."

  "Friday," he said, incredulously.

  "I'll have to pay for feed until Monday," Roberto said.

  The air was mild and gentle, and the scent of pine needles, wood fires, and hot olive oil vaulted over the wall.

  They drove the sheep down the Viale del Campo Boario and turned them inside the wall at the Protestant Cemetery. Circling around Monte Testaccio, upon which many goats were standing, they came to the Mattatoio and drove the sheep through a wide gate. As soon as the animals entered the vast courtyard of ramshackle pens they knew they had been betrayed. Though the slaughter had ended for the day, voices were left that they could hear, and the smell of death made them bleat in terror. Their eyes were wide, as if they could see what was bearing down on them, but the fences were too high to leap and the walls too solid to breach. The hearts of the ewes must have broken for their lambs.

  ALESSANDRO FOLLOWED as direct a route as he could through the winding streets of Trastevere. The corners where toughs had been stationed since the time of Caligula were now empty. They were in the army, in prison, dead, or hiding in the hills. Now and then he passed young soldiers with tortured expressions that meant their leave was running out. They glanced at his beard and sheepskins, at the shepherd's staff, and at his glittering eyes, that said he spent all his time in the open air, and they envied him.

  As he climbed the Gianicolo's thousand steps in a dim October sunset he smelled the leaves, felt the cool air above the stones, and was comforted by the special darkness of the steep hill on which he knew every turn, every rock, and every palsied iron rail.

  He was half convinced that climbing the Gianicolo, coming up the steps, and rounding the corners was a pendulum in some great clockwork that would set everything right. On an evening like this, his father would be tending the fire, and his mother looking after dinner, in dispute with Luciana over how to set the table or the length of time that something needed to be cooked. The lights would be shining from the windows, and smoke would be rising from the chimneys. The leaves in the garden would be raked, the sidewalks swept. At dusk the house was like a lantern.