A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "You're an educated man who was born in Rome and will die there," she said.

  "You're right. I was born in Rome, and I have been educated almost to death. What was it like on the Somme?" he asked. "No matter how many thousands die here we're always left with the impression that we are only pretending, that the real war is there."

  "The real war is there," she confirmed. "When it stops there, it will stop here. If it goes on there, it will go on here. France is the heart of the war. France is always the heart of the war."

  "Why?"

  "Geography, illusion, or because the French see themselves as the center of the world. The country is so beautiful that when the world is finished with its work it looks to France for what it loves. With everyone's head turned so, it becomes the center. I'm able to say this not because I'm French, but because I'm Italian."

  "You think in broad terms."

  "At times."

  "You're a nurse."

  "Yes, I'm a nurse." After a moment's reflection, she challenged him. "Would you be surprised to learn that I have read a book on economics?"

  "I suppose I would have to be."

  "What about twenty?"

  "Twenty?"

  "Yes, economics—history, theory, prices, inflation, why not? It's true."

  "You can't, being a woman, earn a living as an economist."

  "I know."

  "I am deeply impressed by a woman who, for no reason other than her own fascination, has read twenty books on economics."

  "But I stopped."

  "Why?"

  "I wanted something more alive. The first book I read after that was a description of the South Pacific. Cerulean blue on every page."

  "Let me see you."

  "No."

  "What if the house were hit by a shell?" he asked.

  "Pouf, au revoir, goodbye," she said. "Do you think it will be?"

  "No."

  "Then do you think you should turn around?"

  "No."

  "Tell me why?"

  "Because I'm the only soldier of the thousands you've seen, other than those who are blind, who has fallen in love with you without seeing you."

  "And how could that possibly matter?"

  "Because you're beautiful."

  "Perhaps I am, perhaps I'm not, I really don't know. Don't turn around."

  "It's difficult."

  "Then perhaps what comes of it will be good."

  "I don't know your name."

  "I don't think I should tell you. The more time passes when you know neither my name, nor anything else about me, and have not seen me, the better you'll know me. It's your supposition, but I've come to believe it."

  "Well that's good."

  "But aren't you disappointed that someday you might come to know me, my name, my age, my face."

  "I know your age."

  "You do? How?"

  "By your voice. You're twenty-three."

  She was amazed. "And when is my birthday?"

  Instead of thinking about it, guessing, or fearing that he might be wrong, Alessandro said, "June," and he was right again. "You were born in Rome, in June. It was when I was four years old, and loved to ride on merry-go-rounds and in pony carts. For several years, at least, we both lived in Rome, completely unaware of one another, though we may have crossed paths a dozen times. Rome was for me an entire universe. Young children see so clearly things of poignant detail, even if they soon learn to forget."

  "But not you."

  "I hope not."

  "You know me by my voice."

  "It's no talent of mine, but the lovely way you speak."

  "Le refus de la louange est un désir d'être loué deux fois, " she said.

  "I don't have to translate that," he told her. "Only in France are the wounded required to speak French, and even there the requirement is harsh, because life is difficult enough without having to pronounce it correctly. Did you smile?"

  "A little smile."

  "Tell me your name."

  "No. I resent you. I resent that you can see me without looking at me. I resent that you may have fallen in love with me without having seen me. I resent that you lie here, wounded, and your power darts about the room."

  "You won't let me see you," he answered, "but I have seen you. In our conversation you haven't been subordinate. Our powers are exactly equal."

  "Yes, but you're wounded!"

  "And you're tired. We're exactly equal, to the longest decimal, precisely, and it will always be so. The balance is perfect, and you know it."

  "If it's true, it isn't fair," she said.

  "Why?"

  "Because you're going back in the line." Her gown rustled under her coat as she rose from the chair. And then she left.

  Alessandro lay in bed observing the light of the moon as it bleached the window panes and washed the sky with silver. He felt his fever warm the blankets and burn his face. He waited quietly, and was prepared to wait longer.

  Half an hour passed, enough time for her to have walked home and walked back. She was all grace, and he might not have heard her on the stairs, especially if each step was taken with hesitation.

  Now the moon was fully visible through the open window, perfectly round and bright. Though she had not returned, he put no limit on his waiting, and refused to think of its end or of disappointment. He was prepared to listen for her until his strength failed. The moon crossed the window, and its uncompromising light left in darkness the side of the room it had first lit. The clock in the village struck the quarter hours, the halves, and the hours. The snow-covered streets, bathed in white and glistening with ice, were empty, and sentries at the edge of the village would have slept had it not been for the dazzling moonlight that brought them marvelous waking dreams.

  It was not a time for coming and going, but Alessandro heard the door open. She had come back. She spoke haltingly and with great feeling.

  "I went to bed, but then I rose and dressed again. I can't stay. My name is Ariane," she said. "Your name, Alessandro, is written on the chart."

  THE NEXT day, Ariane came at five-thirty in the afternoon. When Alessandro had glimpsed her standing outside the dispensary, with her left hand shielding her eyes from the sharp light of the glaciers, almost in a salute, she had been thinking that she wanted a man, even if it were someone barely acceptable. It would not be the greatest sin to take a man who was perhaps a little coarse, or not of her social station, or who would leave her later, or philander, or die before he departed the mountains. Souls were floating up at such a great rate that surely God would forgive her for holding one down and keeping him close to her in the warmth of her bed. She wanted a man who had seen the bodies lined up in rows, the tatters, the endless columns of exhausted soldiers walking bitterly from place to place, the corpses sprawled over the wire. She would not know how to talk to a man who hadn't seen these things, as she had, much less lie with him in love, and here every man knew what she knew.

  One of the minor casualties of the war had been her expectation of finding someone in circumstances that were more joyful than those of the dispensaries in Gruensee—at a dinner party, a ball, a picnic, the racetrack, or on the terrace of a house at Cap d'Antibes, surrounded by geraniums and bees. She had assumed that love would come under blue skies, perhaps early in June, with a young man of good prospects and family, perhaps of wealth, perhaps as quietly handsome as he was strong. She was uninterested in towering, square-jawed men with huge domineering faces, who were to be bred like horses with horse-like women. She wanted someone to match her in fineness of feature—a man whose virility did not crawl all over him, but who was, instead, meticulous and unassuming.

  After months of sleepless nights and exhausting days in the snowbound village of wounded conscripts, she cared no longer for anyone to be sent to her, as if on a breeze, in a lovely time of year. As much as she needed love, she had to refuse it. Hardly a man came through, even those who were married, who was not as desperate for affection as was she, and
, each time, the symmetry served to seal her heart. Boys who were mutilated and dying called with their eyes for her love, and that she could not love them was slowly killing her.

  She had lingered in Alessandro's room at first merely because she had been cold and tired. Their eyes had yet to meet, their judgment had not been overwhelmed, and the accident that had tested their patience was as if the terrace at Cap d'Antibes had been transported to Gruensee, as if the reticent graces for which she longed had been married hypnotically with the stronger things that drove men to women and women to men, in a place like this, the first refuge from battle.

  "It's Ariane," she said as she entered the room.

  He had always been impressed by the self-possession of someone who could refer to himself, in this way, by his own name.

  "I took over some shifts. I'll be in and out all evening."

  Alessandro sat up straighter in bed. He tugged at his linen hospital gown until it was smooth. "If you do things like bring me dinner and take my temperature, the game may be over."

  "It's not a game," she said, closing the door behind her. The latch clicked.

  She hadn't removed her cape, and her right hand held the gold chain that crossed at the top near the throat. She walked forward to the open window, closed it abruptly, and turned on her heels.

  She neither moved nor spoke, and she was the color of a rose. Backlit once again by the darkening evening sky just as she had been at the dispensary, she rocked to and fro almost imperceptibly, not because she was cold, but because the blood was pounding through her so forcefully that it actually caused her to sway.

  As Alessandro sat in the bed, and she stood still, he fell so deeply in love with her, so hard, and so fast, that he was able to follow her even in her reticence. After she unclasped the gold chain and put her cape on the sill, she stood before him in the flowing and pleated nurse's gown.

  "My father used to say," she said, "that I should look for someone who would be able to sail a boat in heavy seas, who would be a master of his profession, who would love children. And he used to say that I should seek the kind of man who could take me into the private rooms of an expensive jeweler and show me diamonds and emeralds. What he meant by that was not that this person would be rich—I think his image was of an employee—but that he would have to be patient, trustworthy, considerate, and refined."

  "I have a temper," Alessandro said.

  "Not with me," she answered. "Never with me."

  He dipped his head and briefly closed his eyes, as if to signify a vow. "Never."

  Not knowing what to say, she asked if he wanted her to bring the dinner.

  "Why must we eat so early?"

  "For the same reason that you eat early in the line, so people don't have to work too long in the dark."

  "I'm not thinking about dinner."

  "No?"

  "No."

  "What are you thinking about?"

  "I'm thinking about you," he said. "I've forgotten what it's like to touch a woman, I've forgotten how to do it, but I want more than anything to kiss you, to hold you. Would you forgive me if, at first, I were awkward?"

  "Yes."

  "Would you forgive me if at first I seemed cold?"

  "Yes."

  "And for having, at the moment, only one good arm?"

  "Oh yes."

  Ariane walked forward until she stood by the bed. Her eyes swept down toward her feet, and as she kicked off her shoes, her mouth tightened. Then she straightened her head, and her eyes and Alessandro's met.

  SEVERAL HOURS later when Ariane crossed the green to sign the nurses' muster sheet, her face was red and her hair disheveled in a fashion that connoted neither the pressing-down of sleep nor the action of the wind, but something quite different. Her eyes were in rebellion against focus, and she felt as if she were floating through the moonlight. Her commanding officer, a Swede who was able even at fifty to wear her blond hair in a single braid and still look like a young woman, stood up abruptly next to a little table at which she had been writing in a notebook, approached Ariane, and put the heel of her hand on Ariane's forehead. When she saw that the young woman's neck, chest, and shoulders were almost pink and red, and that her hair was tangled, with a lock in front falling until it touched her right eyebrow at the top of its strikingly bold arch, she dropped her hand and stepped back.

  "You must be less obvious. You must never appear in public the way you look now," she said in French.

  Ariane blushed.

  "It's quite apparent that either you have typhus or you have spent the last three hours making love. Ariane, even in France you would cause a stir in this condition, would you not?"

  "It would depend upon the reason, Madame."

  "Anyway, this is not France. Try to be more discreet. And if you're found out, come to me. I'll say you have a fever, and all will be well."

  Ariane smiled in gratitude.

  "Ariane."

  "Yes?"

  "The war has put an end to many things. One cannot expect the forms of the past to prevail, but will you marry this man?"

  Ariane tightened her lips and pulled-in the lower one somewhat, as she often did when she dealt with a difficult question. "I hope, Madame, that he will not be killed."

  IN THE high mountains, summer and winter are shuffled throughout the year like wild cards, and in the last days of Alessandro's recuperation summer came briefly to the Alto Adige. As the sun shone from dusk to dawn in clear motionless air, the dispassionate colors of winter were enriched, birds sang as if for their lives, and it was so warm and bright that the partially recovered soldiers took to the snowfields, where the air was hot with dazzling reflections.

  One morning Alessandro went to the nurses' barracks to wake Ariane, who lay in a bed just behind the partition that divided the sleeping quarters from the dining room and the kitchen.

  The other women, who were standing half dressed at ironing boards, holding kettles, or sitting on their cots lacing their boots, froze as Alessandro knelt by Ariane. As he put his left hand under her head, and his right hand on her shoulder, and lifted her gently from sleep, no one moved. They watched as if the world depended upon it, until she modestly pulled the blanket up almost to her chin. Then they resumed what they had been doing.

  As Alessandro waited outside, leaning against a stucco wall that had already been warmed by the sunlight, he thought of the women who lived with Ariane in the chalet. He longed for the gentleness in the way they lived, the peace, and the safety. Even their fingers were beautiful—their voices, the way they brushed their hair, the way they laced their boots, leaning down with tresses about to tumble forward but held in check as if by a miracle. They were beautiful even in the way they breathed. A few days before, as Ariane had taken off her dress, Alessandro had watched the rising and falling of her chest, the movement of the rib cage barely perceptible under the skin, and the changes in color that accompanied the steady sound of her breathing. Though neither he nor Ariane knew, she had begun to carry his child.

  When she came out, fresh from sleep, Alessandro asked, "Do you think you can walk all the way down to the Adige?"

  "I can," she answered. "I'm not sure about you."

  "I don't walk on my arm. Anyway, if I have trouble, you can carry me."

  THE SLOPE from Gruensee to the Adige was white without imperfection. Alessandro and Ariane skated down and across it for an hour. Falling brought not pain but surprise, for the snow was powdery and dry, and even when they fell they stayed warm. Though the glare hurt the back of their eyes, and they were quickly sunburnt, they felt like the angels who inhabit the cool air above a flume, and who, with nothing to do but sing, give to the water its tranquil and hypnotic sound.

  On the riverbank they found a bare concave rock facing south, and stayed there for as long as the sun warmed them, lost in lovemaking in which sometimes Ariane's hair hung over the edge of the rock and was lapped by the ice-cold Adige as it surged and relaxed. The river roared, and on their grani
te platform it was so hot and bright that they leaned down to cup the cold water in their hands and drink.

  "What is the name of the painting?" Ariane asked as if she had suddenly realized that she hadn't remembered.

  "It's called La Tempesta, and it's in Venice, in the Gallerie dell'Accademia. They say, what could it mean, a woman with a child, disrobed, and the soldier, standing apart from her, disconnected. But I know exactly what to make of it. Today I saw a lovely sight—the nurses lacing their boots, brushing their hair, fastening their earrings. If I were a painter, I would have wanted to paint it. So with Giorgione. He intended to praise elemental things, and to show a soldier on the verge of return. I'm not surprised that scholars and critics don't understand it. Giorgione lived in the time of the plague, and the scholars and critics, for the most part, have had to do without plague or war, which make the simple things one takes for granted shine like gold. What does the painting mean? It means love. It means coming home."

  Alessandro had been ordered to a unit of Alpini far to the north of Gruensee. "When the war is over," he said as he held her, full of hope, "we'll marry, we'll live in Rome, and we'll have children."

  She cried.

  ON THE morning of Alessandro's departure, a squadron of six Austrian bi-planes on a snow-covered field near Innsbruck started their engines. The powerful winds of the high ranges, in updrafts, downdrafts, and cyclones that raced around the peaks, made flying dangerous, but these airplanes were much heavier and more powerful than most of the light craft that daredevils had flown through the mountains before the war, or even the fighter planes that were dispatched to reconnoiter and to harass the Italians in their solid trenchwork and fortifications. Most of the time, in the vastness of the mountains, airplanes were no more threatening than insects. These, however, each carried four hundred kilos of bombs. With twenty-four hundred kilos of high explosive and incendiary, a small group of aircraft, if piloted well, could destroy a railroad train, explode an ammunition depot, cause great harm to a column on the march, or obliterate a river crossing.