A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  Alessandro was unable to see what the nurse looked like, because she wore a loden cloak with a hood that hid her features. She took him outside into the darkness, which made recognition even more difficult. Though Alessandro tried, all he could tell was that she was tall and thin, almost like a stork.

  Every now and then he would turn, nearly falling off his feet, and try to peek beneath the hood.

  "Don't try to kiss me," she said. "It's against regulations, and I don't kiss just anybody."

  "I want to see your face," he said. "Are you a Hindu?"

  "No kisses," was her reply. Apart from that, she talked nonstop, something about hairdressers at mineral spas, and how after the war she was either going to work for one, marry one, be one, or all three, because after the war mineral spas would be crowded with the wounded and the infirm—and their wives.

  Just before they got to the chalet where Alessandro was to sleep, he tried again to look at her face. "I don't understand a thing you're saying," he said. "I don't know why, or why hairdressers are why, never having been to one. What are they?"

  "Uh uh uh," she answered, steering him into a doorway. "No kisses." And she said it because the nurses, touching men all day, surrounded by them, bathing them, and carrying them, sometimes, in private moments, kissed their patients—and allowed their patients to kiss them—deeply. In a place where even plain women were beautiful, it happened all the time.

  She and a heavyset young nurse helped Alessandro up two flights of stairs, one broad and one narrow. "Do you have to use the W.C.?" they asked.

  "As what?" he wanted to know.

  "What do you mean?"

  "As a broom, a bayonet, a hat, what?"

  Uncomprehendingly, they settled him in.

  "No! Open the window," he protested. "I like the air."

  They opened it. "You'll need six blankets."

  "Two will be fine, if you double one of them."

  They put the blankets over him and propped his head on a pil low covered in an ice-cold white case with so much starch in it that at first Alessandro thought it was wood.

  Although the room was the size of a closet, it was his alone, it wasn't a cell, and the door wasn't locked. The walls were cedar. It had been a child's room, and the bed was too small, but the pillow made up for it: he hadn't used a pillow, except in his brief stay at home, for almost three years.

  Free and alone, with his boots finally off, an arm in a sling, and a fire burning comfortably within him as he lay under the three layers of wool, he breathed the pure air that fell like a river from the glaciers, and he sank back onto the glistening pillow case.

  He waited for the moon to tint the clouds ghostly silver, but he suspected that by the time the moon flooded the room with light he would be asleep. He smiled to himself in admiration of the mountains, for although he had been there only two days, connections were forming and dissolving with awesome rapidity, as if every time the sun or the moon were hidden by clouds or revealed by rising mist, a new world had formed. He had seen it before at high altitudes. Time was both compressed and extended. The air coming in the window was laden with messages Alessandro no longer understood. As they broke in their millions like whitecaps on the sea, they shattered the peace of the room and restored it in a rhythm that ebbed and flowed and rocked the wounded soldier to sleep.

  WHEN HE awoke he thought that the next morning had arrived, but it was only later in the evening. He smelled dinner cooking, and not only did it repel him, it made no sense, as nowhere that he knew, and certainly never in the army, had anyone heard of beef in the morning.

  He had developed a high fever that reminded him, in its intensity, of racing in a single shell. His body was pleasantly burning at an even pace, and his face was as hot as it would have been had he been in the sun for several hours. The steady combustion was such that if nature had had a fire-tender, the fire-tender might have been sitting with his feet up, marveling at the flame.

  Alessandro lifted his right hand from the blankets and touched his nose, which, despite the rest of him, was ice cold. If by some miracle he were to die of a superficial wound, to die painlessly in a fever would be best. Mumbling to himself from within his chest in speech that seemed so pleasurable and fast that it was almost like singing, he said, in quiet measured cadences, "Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow."

  Now it was dark, and not even a hawk could have told a white thread from a black thread. Alessandro tried to turn his head away from the window and toward the door, but his neck was stiff and he could hardly move. He thought this was the first sign of death, and although he was content to die, he wanted to pass with the illusion, at least, of warmth and light.

  He must have said so, and clearly, for a woman sitting in the corner behind him, on a chair with a rush seat, answered the question he had not really asked.

  "You're not going to die," she said.

  He was embarrassed that she had been with him all that time and he had not been aware. "How do you know?" he asked.

  "This isn't the building for it."

  "It isn't right," Alessandro said, "that you've been listening to me and didn't warn me of your presence."

  "I don't usually find it necessary to warn people of my presence, especially if they're unconscious. I didn't know you were awake."

  "Neither did I. Didn't you hear me?" he asked.

  "I heard someone talking in his sleep, or in delirium. You're delirious now."

  "I wouldn't have spoken had I known you were here."

  "But I'm too tired to move from this chair merely to save you embarrassment."

  "I can't see you," he said with sudden irritation.

  "I can't turn, and it's dark."

  "Why do you need to see me?" she asked.

  "Simply to know to whom I am speaking. Why don't you come to the window so that I can see you."

  "Because I'm sitting quite comfortably on this chair. I'm warm, I have my coat on. I'm here to make sure that your fever doesn't get the best of you, and to bring you food if you want it, and I have no intention of going to the window so you can see my face. Why do you need to see my face?"

  "Why do you have a face? Why do you have a body?"

  "For the same reason that everyone else has a face and a body, so that I can carry on in this world."

  "Then what's wrong with showing me what it is that enables you to carry on in this world?"

  "When soldiers come out of the line, having been without women for months, or a year..."

  "Or two years."

  "They fall in love with the first woman they see. You could be a butter knife, and they'd still fall in love with you. It isn't very flattering, it happens continually, and I'm tired of it. Even the ones who have been blinded, mutilated by shells that have burst in their faces, though they do not dare presume that they will be loved ever again, fall in love with a voice. And what can I give them? Nothing. I'm just a woman. I'm not the end of the war, or the end of your suffering, or some magical, higher being who will undo all that you've seen."

  "Are you familiar with Giorgione?" Alessandro asked as he struggled to sit up, and then fell back. "Giorgione painted a painting that flatly contradicts you. It flatly contradicts you. In the painting, a woman quiets the storm and is a soldiers only hope. You may not like the idea, it may be too much for you, but what you deny, and what Giorgione asserts, is true.

  "I know that some soldiers come out of the line filled with sex. I've heard men talk like animals, even about their wives. They go home on leave and they fuck their wives until they're raw."

  "Until who's raw?" she asked, wondering why she was allowing a man to speak to her in this way.

  "Both. It's as if they're seeking bl
ood. It's always until blood, or beyond."

  "How do you know?"

  "They talk freely. The coarse among them think like mechanics—so many days without sex, a simple arithmetic theory of pressure, water behind a dam, what-you-will. And then they talk about it as if the soldiers staring at them from the mud are more important than the wives they've left at home. They're like cats who drop prey at your feet."

  "I wouldn't know."

  "I would. There's something to the notion of accumulated desire, and many soldiers sense that they're driven by something less coarse than they think, but who has time to think it out?"

  "You do."

  "Only because you've forced me to think and talk. If you'd let me see you, talk would be unnecessary."

  She made no response. It encouraged him.

  "All right, then, I'll have to keep on talking—I like talking to you. When soldiers go home, their first desire, whether they know it or not, is to have children, children being the only antidote for war. In the painting by Giorgione, the woman and her baby are imperturbable, the center of the universe. The soldier may stray, the waters may rise, but the mother and child save the world, again and again."

  "What has that to do with me? It's just as I've said. I could be any woman."

  "Yes. And I, in the trench, shivering, wounded, could be any man. To be reduced so, to what is elemental, is not a dishonor. Never will anyone know you better than he who has known you when everything you have has been stripped away. Never will anyone know you better than when you are as you are now, sitting in a chair, with your coat on, in this cold dark room, hungry and exhausted."

  "You can't see me," she said. "You don't know me. We've never seen one another's faces. We may feel a certain affinity because we may have similar backgrounds, and now we're struggling in this place, but after the war it would disappear. For two people on a raft at sea, being rescued changes everything."

  "It depends on how long they've been on the raft," he said.

  "You don't give up, do you?"

  "Not yet."

  "You're one of a million soldiers. I speak to a hundred a day. Half of them fall in love with me. It means nothing."

  "I ask nothing," Alessandro said.

  "You think you've captured me?"

  "No."

  "Why are you suddenly confident?"

  "Confident of what?"

  "Detached."

  "I'm not detached. I'm only certain that I've touched upon the truth."

  "How do you know that I'll come back? It would be very easy for me to trade you to someone else. Besides, we're rotated and transferred just as you are. Tomorrow I could be back in Trento. You might even die."

  "Then I'm not in the right building."

  "I'm sorry. The fever is a good sign. You're in the right building."

  "Why can't I turn? I feel paralyzed."

  "When you have a fever and you sleep in one position in the cold air, it can happen."

  "If you don't come back," he said, "then you won't come back, which will mean that you aren't the woman I think you are. I was sure that you were. Your voice is beautiful. Still, it doesn't matter if either of you disappears, because the other will remain."

  "You're delirious," she told him.

  "I am."

  "When I return in a few hours, if you're awake, if you're no longer delirious, you need not be embarrassed."

  "Love is only embarrassing to those who cannot love. And, besides, I didn't say that I was in love with you. You did."

  "Though I haven't seen you, I won't say that you don't attract me, but I think that in a day or two I could forget you. That's what happens up here. You can't know someone in five minutes. You can't fall in love in five minutes."

  "Please come back," he said.

  THE NEXT morning, the stork-like nurse, the Hindu, came to take Alessandro's temperature, change the dressings, and deliver breakfast. When she attended to the bandages her touch was as gentle and communicative as anything Alessandro had ever known. Whoever married her would have her intelligence, gratitude, and kindness for the rest of his life, and would perhaps know something far more entrancing than romantic love.

  "When will you return?" Alessandro asked.

  "At lunch."

  "What about the evening?"

  "I don't have the evening shift."

  "Who does?"

  The stork shrugged her high shoulders. "Someone else."

  "Do you know her?"

  "No. The schedules change all the time."

  Alessandro pressed no further, but the tall nurse was kind. "I could find out," she volunteered, "and tell you tomorrow, if she doesn't return tonight."

  "It won't be necessary," he said. "I was just curious about who would bring dinner."

  After she left, Alessandro fell asleep, but he was awakened in the middle of the afternoon by artillery echoing in the mountains, half a day's journey away. It sounded like distant thunder—although it did not roll like thunder, and it did not rest like thunder, and probably never in the history of nature had thunder been so tense, repetitive, and gracelessly timed. Almost sitting up, Alessandro listened for a moment and then sank back into his warm bed. He slept until dusk, when he lay awake, waiting for her to come.

  Downstairs in the chalet were a dozen walking wounded in various states of recovery. Soon to return to their units, they played games and talked by the fire. Someone played a zither. It was not likely that an Italian would be playing a zither. Perhaps it was a remaining villager, a wounded Austrian magically absorbed into the Italian ranks, or one of the collaborators who helped the Italians reconnoiter the newly captured territories. Whoever it was, his music had a sad edge. Alessandro wondered how a song could be both sad and cheerful, its counterpoint dancing forward even as it pulled back.

  It was because the world had a life of it own. Leave winter alone or watch it to death, it would still gradually turn to summer. Miracles and paradoxes could be explained by the marvelously independent courses of their elements, and perhaps real beauty could be partially understood in that it was not just a combination, but a dissolution; that after the threads were woven and tangled they then untangled and continued on their separate ways; that the trains that pulled into the station in a riveting spectacle as clouds of steam condensed in the midnight air, then left for different destinations and disappeared; that the drama of a striking clock was impossible without the silence that was both its preface and epilogue. Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence.

  In these metaphysics, and in these metaphysics alone, it hardly mattered if she came or not. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what she had looked like in the light that had reflected from the glaciers. Though he had seen her from a distance and only for an instant, he remembered the way her dress cascaded from her shoulders, the red-and-white enameled clasp that had shone out as if in a painting, and the neckline that it had held together, in proportions that were almost perfect. He saw again the light in her face as she stared into the breeze that carried cool air up from the ice fields. When the truck had rounded the corner and she had become suddenly backlit, her hair glowed and her hands were clasped behind her as she rocked on her feet. He had her forever. And she need not have come. But she did.

  WHEN THE door opened and shut, and the legs of the rush-bottomed chair scraped against the floor, Alessandro could barely speak.

  "What time does the moon rise?" he finally asked, as matter-of-factly as if he had been querying a ticket agent about the arrival of a train.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "The moon."

  "What about the moon?"

  "What time does it rise?"

  "I don't know. I don't have a watch. Sometimes I don't even know what day it is, much less when the moon rises."

  "I thought you wo
uld."

  "Are nurses supposed to know when the moon rises?"

  "Yes. In Rome, every nurse knows when the moon rises."

  "As you can undoubtedly hear," she said, "I'm a Romana, and you know that I'm a nurse. I don't know when the moon will rise, do you?"

  "What do you think I am," Alessandro asked, "an idiot-savant? The moon is capricious to the point of insanity. It rises and sets all over the place, at different times. You never know what it's going to do. Sometimes it doesn't appear, sometimes it's disguised as a pale crescent, and sometimes it comes out full in the daylight. The sun doesn't shine at night, does it."

  "Not in Europe."

  "Imagine if, like the moon, the sun did as it pleased. Only an idiot-savant, someone intoxicated with logarithms and railroad timetables, would know when the moon rises."

  "Do you know?" she asked.

  "In about an hour."

  "You're an idiot-savant."

  "I was almost an idiot-savant, but I didn't succeed. When I was in middle school I could memorize three hundred words of French in a minute. That's as close as I've come."

  "I'm not impressed," she announced.

  "Why? How many words of French can you memorize in a minute?"

  "All of them."

  "All of them?"

  "Yes," she answered. "Every single one."

  "And how is that?"

  "I'm French."

  "I don't believe it. You have no accent whatsoever."

  "My father was Italian."

  "Was?"

  "He died on the Isonzo."

  "I'm sorry."

  "So am I," she said slowly.

  "And your mother?"

  "She was French. When I was a child, she died of influenza." Alessandro heard a break in her voice, even now. "I became a nurse."

  "You've come here because of your father?"

  "Yes. At the beginning of the war I was on the Somme. I loved my father very much. He was a Romano, who spoke like a Florentine. He was just like you."

  "How do you know what I am?"