A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

"I did?"

  "The moment he saw you," the attorney Giuliani stated, forgetting that he was tired, "he was deeply hurt because you are so beautiful and he was so ugly. He knew that he had no chance."

  "I wouldn't have cared what he looked like,"

  Luciana protested.

  "He admired you too much to understand that. He was not a great man, as he would have had to have been to proceed in his infatuation without flagellating himself."

  Luciana screwed up her face in disbelief. "Flagellating himself? Papa, are you crazy?"

  "I'm not crazy. I remembered how that poor louse suffered through every minute of Tancredi."

  "Nabucco."

  "Whatever it was. He sat there glowing in the dark, red hot, mortified, frustrated, and ashamed. He was undergoing more physical pain then than I know now."

  "How can you say that?"

  "I remember," her father said. "Why are you wearing that dress now?

  As Luciana smiled, tears came to her eyes. "A surprise," she said.

  "What surprise?"

  "Papa, look." She gestured at the doorway, at Alessandro.

  "Alessandro?" his father asked. "Is that you Alessandro?"

  Alessandro closed his eyes.

  "Yesterday," his father stated with great difficulty, "a flight of military planes passed over the city. I was able to see them clearly." He held his head high. "I could see the pilots, I could even see their hand signals. A dozen planes were flying in formation."

  He paused. "I said to myself, I wonder if they will bring me my son."

  ALESSANDRO FOUND himself caught up in the obligatory descriptions in which a visitor goes to the window to tell the patient about the things the patient cannot see. Almost as a rule, they are minor and ephemeral—a flight of ochre-colored steps leading down the hill, the small segment of a bridge otherwise hidden by palms, an undistinguished part of a villa, a brown awning, a horse cart passing through an opening in the Aurelian Wall.

  They commented on the food, when it was supposed to arrive, and how it was always late, and they complimented the room itself. The bathroom was small, yes, but, apart from that, the attorney Giuliani's hospital room was a good place in which to recover, it was quiet, and it had high ceilings.

  During the first day the hours passed slowly, as they tried to conceal from one another everything but a ritual optimism that only Luciana might have believed, had she not been able to see that her father and brother were as anxious as if they were about to board a ship to a place where they would stay forever, where they would be stripped of possessions and clothing, and where the streets were teeming with people who spoke another language.

  They feared that they would be stripped not of their clothes and their possessions, but of their senses and their memories. They feared being so light that the only word that could describe what would happen to them was ascension. They feared that soon they would know everything, that they would lie promiscuously in the bodies of men and women and in the mechanics of every thought and every calculation, that they would rest high on individual grains of sand and feel the thunder of their overturning, that they would flow down streams, sit at the bottom of the sea in the dark, and be dashed upon the beach in the waves of cold winter storms.

  The rivalries they had sustained, the ambitions they had harbored, the slights they had endured, and the desires that had made their hearts beat faster, now, if not forgotten, seemed minor. And yet the hours passed slowly, because they dared not say what they knew and they talked instead of things so strange and unexpected that Luciana was astounded, and often could do nothing but let her hands come to rest on her lap. The attorney Giuliani saw a cross-section of the sea on the wall of his room. At times he called it a waterfall. He was amazed as he watched it move, and would point to fish leaping inside it, storms, and breaking waves, as if his children could see everything that he could see.

  During lunch, her father picked up his glass of wine and held it to the light. "Look how red it is," he said. Lucianas eyes darted to her brother.

  "Stairwells are dark and cool at the bottom," the attorney Giuliani said, "and the upper levels expand with the light. You hardly ever pass anyone on the stairs anymore, especially on summer days when you enter, like a hunter, much more alert to every sound than you would be outside in the heat.

  "Why are doctors always foreign?" the attorney Giuliani asked.

  "What do you mean?" Luciana inquired, alarmed. When her father seemed either to lose control or become irrational she reacted with the impatient anger born of fear.

  "My attending physician is Dutch," her father said.

  "It must be the war," Alessandro commented.

  "I don't think so. When my father died, his doctor—not his regular doctor, but the one with whom he ended up—was Spanish. Imagine, a Spanish doctor. The Spaniards are primitives who fight bulls, but it was a Sunday in August and all our esteemed Italian physicians were asleep in beach chairs. His doctor of fifty years had gone to Capri, and we couldn't reach him." The attorney Giuliani thought for a moment. "I'm not sure he would have come back even had we been able to reach him. The death of an old man isn't anything out of the ordinary. People say, well, he lived eighty years, and he was lucky to have had such a long life. This after the man in question has died in excruciating pain and perhaps with no less fear than if he had been a boy of eighteen—except that it's worse in a way, for by the time a man is old he's seen scores of people fall away, and he knows.

  "And if a woman who is past fifty dies, no one but her husband and children even blink. When your mother died ... Your mother was young. I remember her at nineteen, when she felt that she would live forever. When she passed away we didn't really hear from anyone. Isn't that strange. They didn't care.

  "As I die I'll be holding her in my arms when she was close to your age now, Luciana, and the two of you, when you were babies. When you were infants I loved you more than you can imagine. In my flight through darkness I'll hold to that image: the four of us—your mother in her early twenties, and you at two and a half, or three.

  "And my own father," their father said in a suddenly high and weak voice. "When I see him I will have to be a child myself. It wouldn't do for me to be an old man. Alessandro, can I be a child for the sake of my father, and a father for the sake of my children? Will God grant that?"

  "I don't know," Alessandro said.

  "How do you know?" his father asked.

  Rather than disappoint him, Alessandro improvised. "I don't know for sure," he said, "but I can't imagine that God, who is so adept at linking parents with children, would so cruelly separate them. Perhaps it isn't anywhere near the truth. Perhaps I'm merely self-serving. I don't know, but I believe against all odds in exactly what you say."

  "You don't care what anyone else thinks, do you?"

  "No, Papa. I never did."

  "That can only be because you believe."

  "Yes."

  "And how does God speak to you?"

  "In the language of everything that is beautiful."

  Alessandro stared at the sheets as they rested upon his father's legs. A nursing-sister came into the room, rapid and businesslike, wheeling a cart ahead of her. When she opened the door, the curtains leapt out the windows and fluttered as if they wanted to escape.

  THOUGH THE attorney Giuliani was weak and tired he appeared to be neither sick nor in any danger, and to Alessandro it seemed as if his father had been condemned to a school or a barracks as punishment for being unable to bound up stairs or remember immediately the capital of a protectorate in Arabia. Soon he would return home, and by spring he would be sitting in the ruins of the garden, meditating upon the execution of his son. Despite his frequent mention of death, his children did not believe that his time had come, but when they arrived the next evening, he was sleeping and could not be roused.

  "Has this happened before?" Alessandro asked Luciana, who had just come in from the nursing station.

  "Yes."

 
"When does he wake up?"

  "Once he woke up after about an hour. Another time he was like this for two days."

  "What's the name of the doctor?"

  "De Roos. They said he was here this afternoon just after we left."

  "Why haven't we seen him?"

  "I've seen him. He makes his rounds when the visitors are gone. He told me that, compared to most of his patients, Papa was in good health."

  "But Luciana, behind the screens the place is full of soldiers with abdominal wounds, a whole battalion of them. They're dying."

  "Why is it so quiet?"

  "They don't scream when they die. Death is quiet. It gets its way with hardly a whisper. They've probably been dying here ten or twenty a day."

  "Oh God."

  "What does the doctor look like?"

  "He's your age. He wears a bow tie and smokes little cigars."

  When Alessandro found him, De Roos had just gone into a records room. He was the model of politeness and consideration, and Alessandro soon sensed that this was not manner alone.

  "What can I do for you?" De Roos asked.

  After Alessandro had introduced himself, he said, "Please tell me about my father. Don't hide anything. He may not have time for that, and I don't either: I'm going back to the front."

  In his white coat and bow tie, with a small tin box of cigars clearly visible in the side pocket and a stethoscope arched over his neck like a cat that has learned to ride on its owner's shoulders, the doctor was the picture of authority and expertise. His was the latest knowledge. He was fresh. He would neither miss a clue nor make a mistake from habit. His intelligence made him so pleasantly alert that he probably did not have to rely on habit.

  "I have more hope for your father than I do for many of my other patients. He might walk out of here."

  "Are you doing everything you can?"

  "No. Were understaffed. We lack sufficient quantities of the drugs we need. When your father isn't able to get the proper medication, he slips into a coma. If he dies, that's when it'll be."

  "What medicine?"

  De Roos said a word that, for some reason, Alessandro was unable to take in.

  "What is it, again?"

  De Roos repeated it slowly, but, seeing that Alessandro was not comprehending, he produced a piece of paper and a fountain pen, and wrote the word so fast that Alessandro could not have fathomed it unless he had already known it. It looked like a tangle of branches in a forest, it was Latin, and the waves and jagged edges of the doctor's pen strokes defeated Alessandro's eyes. Nonetheless, Alessandro folded the paper and carefully put it in his breast pocket.

  "The army has it," De Roos said, coughing, and then hitting the tin box with the palm of his right hand as if to punish the tobacco. "They use it to stabilize the heart in surgery, of which more is now being performed than ever in the history of man. We get very little, but I have heard that battalions of soldiers in the mountains scour meadows for the plant from which it is extracted."

  A chill went up and down Alessandro's spine. "Can you buy it on the black market?" he asked.

  De Roos considered the idea. "Probably not. Most of the demand is satisfied. The army has its own closed system. It's just the old people who can't get enough, and I don't think the black market is attuned to their needs or ours."

  "But this is partly a military hospital."

  "For soldiers who have been written off. The surgery is done up north. Then they drop them behind the lines to recover or to die. About seventy percent die."

  "You'd never know it. The visitors don't seem to know it."

  "The visitors always look worried."

  "Yes, but they keep up a good front, and they dress very carefully."

  "Ah, they do, but near the end that all falls apart."

  "Don't you do surgery here, to save the ones who are dying?"

  "We drain the wounds, sometimes we clean out a cavity. It's hardly surgery. Anyway, the army doesn't think so, not from the way they ration out supplies."

  Alessandro retrieved the little piece of folded paper and held it up. "How much do you need?" he asked.

  "As much as anyone would care to give."

  "And when will you next examine my father?"

  De Roos looked at his watch. "Probably around midnight. It's hard to say exactly. If you'd like I can write a note so you can enter the hospital and be present when I do see him."

  "Thank you."

  "Around midnight, give or take an hour."

  "I have to bring my sister home. Then I'll be back."

  De Roos was writing, in the same unfathomable script. "She can be there, too," he said.

  "You've noticed her?"

  "How might I not have noticed her?" It seemed to Alessandro that the doctor was taking refuge in ambiguity, until De Roos said, "She's insanely beautiful." That was all he said, and he was in perfect control, as if he had simply been making a clinical observation. He folded the second paper and gave it to Alessandro.

  "Thank you, thank you so much."

  "No," De Roos said. "You mustn't thank me. The relatives of patients thank the physician as if the physician were God. It's no good, and if the patient dies it turns to ash—not just for them, but, as you can imagine, for me. I'll see you later."

  Alessandro bounded up the stairs. At least now he had done something to further his father's chances. The two pieces of paper in his pocket seemed to lift him up as if he were attached to a sky hook. Sky-hook was a term that his father sometimes used, the meaning of which

  Alessandro had never really understood, for, after all, no such thing existed.

  LUCIANA WAS asleep in her bed as Alessandro passed furtively through the opening in the wall and ran for the Villa Sciarra. If the carabinieri happened upon him at that hour they would demand to see his papers. The gates of Villa Sciarra were closed. He climbed them, dropped in, and moved through the dark with only the sounds of the gravel paths under his feet, the streams, and the fountains, to guide him. Though he could see nothing, he moved ahead, all of his senses sweeping the way in front of him for any sign or signal.

  "Good," De Roos said quietly when Alessandro walked into his fathers room. The young doctor, who had just arrived, was shaking down a thermometer. "Help me turn your father toward you."

  Alessandro saw that his father was awake.

  De Roos spoke to him. "Signore, we are going to take your temperature."

  The attorney Giuliani, disoriented but wise, nodded and tried to turn in bed. He couldn't. Alessandro took him in his arms and pulled him over. Though his son held him as if they were at the edge of a cliff, the old man had only turned on his pillows so that the doctor could insert the thermometer in his rectum.

  "You see, Alessandro, what it all comes to?" he asked, glassy-eyed.

  "Papa," Alessandro said. "Forgive me."

  "For what?" his father asked, as his head rested on Alessandro's shoulder and Alessandro grasped him forcefully. For being young when I'm old?"

  "Yes."

  "I won't forgive you for that." His father took a breath as the thermometer was withdrawn, fell back, and looked at his son. "It's my salvation."

  "You have a fever," De Roos said loudly into the attorney Giuliani's right ear, "because you have a cardiac infection. The very weakness of your heart allows the infection to rage, further weakening it, and so on. If we can stabilize the heart, we can reverse the decline."

  "Good," the father said, as if he had not understood, as if the doctor were a fool who didn't know what was ahead.

  "How do you feel?" Alessandro asked, adopting the same authoritative tone.

  His father looked at him half with suspicion and half with amusement. He shrugged his shoulders. "Not all that good," he said, weakly.

  "Do you have pain?" De Roos asked.

  "No."

  "Are you afraid?"

  "No."

  "Good. Rest, Signore. If all goes well, you'll walk out of here."

  "If all goes well," the
attorney Giuliani echoed, in the same voice that he would have used to draw attention to a spurious clause in a contract.

  De Roos took Alessandro aside and they spoke in the considered manner of young men who are given the task of controlling events that they do not yet comprehend and that they do not yet know are uncontrollable. The attorney Giuliani understood this, and had seen it a dozen times before. He didn't blame them for their efforts. To the contrary, he was seduced by the hope that seemed to come to them so easily. He knew that to guide themselves when they couldn't see, to be firm in the face of the unknowable, and to do what was right when they didn't know what it was, they—even the doctor—had to posture. When he saw that Alessandro was trying to do the impossible, he realized that Alessandro was moved by love. He understood that Alessandro knew, and yet did not know, that they would soon part forever. Above all, the posturing alerted him. He recognized the tone into which Alessandro had been forced, for, once, a long time before, he had been forced into it himself.

  ALESSANDRO DID not visit Orfeo at home, because a poor man with burning ambition can hate his house as much as he hates the many other things that weigh upon him. Instead, he went to the palatial Ministry of War, where Orfeo sat on a raised platform overlooking hundreds of scribes, typists, and sealing-wax clerks who were busy manufacturing the documents that fueled the war.

  Orfeo was hunched over an enormous desk, scratching with a plume at an unrolled sheet of vellum weighted casually at its four corners with heavy royal seals. His feet did not even begin to reach the floor, he was dressed like a dandy, and anyone who looked at him could see that he wasn't merely copying the proclamation, but composing it as well, for the features of his unusual face seemed to be dancing in the rapture of creation, and he hummed a song to match the rhythm of his prose.

  A minute later, in his private office, where one wall was of heavy vault doors and the other of glass, he kept glancing through the panes at his underscribes, and he spoke to Alessandro in a mad whisper.

  "Of course scribes have always cleared up their masters' punctuation, adding a comma here, a hyphen there. And spelling, well, that goes without saying. If you're supposed to copy the word tintinnabulation, and it's spelled tintinnablution, or if heinous is spelled anus, as sometimes occurs, what are you supposed to do, leave it?"