A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

"There are ways to argue with blind faith," said the leader of the deputation. "We can do that later, but, tell me, what is it that you think you'll get from believing?"

  "Nothing," Alessandro responded.

  "Nothing? Do you really believe, then?"

  "I never took my religious instruction seriously," Alessandro told them, "because it was delivered in the language of reason. I asked everyone you can imagine, from the nuns when I was a child, to bishops, philosophers, and theologians later on, why do you speak of God in the language of reason? And they said it was because God has burdened those who believe in Him with the inability to prove His existence except in the language of His enemies, which is a language in which you cannot prove His existence. Why bother? I asked. Their answers showed me that they believe in God no more strongly than you do. Can you see a group of people on a beach in a storm, deafened by the surf, their hair blown back from their foreheads, their eyes tearing, trying to prove the existence of the wind and the sea?

  "I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough. I'm grateful for it. I foresee no reward, no eternal life. I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion."

  "You're grateful for what you have?" they asked, their lips curling into bitter smiles. The leader said, "You're a piece of shit in a dungeon. You live on potatoes and salt, and you're a servant to the dying scum of a dying world. For this you're grateful?"

  Alessandro thought for a moment, and then he said, "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "I know what I was, what I had, what I lack. I can close my eyes and see faces. Even when I close my eyes, I still see light. And I knew a man in the Alto Adige, a Milanese, who held tight to his rifle even after his fingers had been severed from his hand.

  "Isn't it strange?" Alessandro asked them. "I believe in God without any hope, in a God of splendor and terror, and you disbelieve because you want to be reassured, because you want some collective spirit, like God Himself, to know that you behaved yourself and suffered no illusions. You fear, above all, to put your weight on a beam that might break."

  "Those illusions, your illusions," the leader told Alessandro, "are your punishment. If you were to free yourself of them you would feel something that you might understand as holiness. You would be relieved of a great burden."

  "I would be relieved of the burden of love, and I would arrive at the gates of death with no resolution, no determination, no fight."

  "Tell me something," the leader said. "Of what use is resolution at the gates of death?"

  "Life is so quick that it's all played out at the gates of death, and the value of resolution is that it quickens life."

  "I find that hard to understand."

  "Of course you do," Alessandro said. "Of course you do. You can't see light. Light tells you nothing. To you it delivers no message."

  "And to you it does?"

  "Yes. It does, and I love it."

  When they were gone he fell back on his pillowless bed, deeply unhappy, and he tried to think of Rome, to conjure visions of rose- colored buildings and light green palms, of a sun that danced in brassy reflections from rooftop to rooftop, of deep shadows in dense gardens, and the spray of a fountain dancing against a deep blue sky.

  He wondered if perhaps by stroking his own forehead and remembering himself as a feverish child, held in his father's arms as his mother slowly passed her hand across his brow, he might find comfort. His father's shirt had smelled of pipe tobacco, and his mother's hands had said to him what he would not have understood had she merely spoken it. The high fever had brought convulsions, they had thought that they were going to lose him, and they had done everything they could do, so they simply held him and stroked his head. The rapidly breathing child could not take his eyes away from the window, for the shutters were closed, but the light was coming through the seams and bursting through the cracks.

  AS SNOW fell in hallucinatory gray streaks past the old glass of the palace windows, Alessandro sat at the long wooden table where the prisoners took their meals. He and thousands of others were angry and exasperated that they were prisoners of war after hostilities had ceased, and he decided that, come what may, he would leave by Christmas. As the light failed outside, the lanterns grew lustrous and warm, like the color of amber, or the sun in Africa. Alessandro slowly ate his potatoes and salt. Each prisoner had been given half a liter of beer. It helped the potatoes taste like something, and it put everyone in a slightly less terrible mood.

  He had positioned himself near the place where the manure grinders sat. As he waited for them to return from the riding school he thought about his escape. A uniform with gold braid and medals, and a Lippizaner, could take him almost anywhere in the capital. He knew the location of the Ministry of War, He could speak passable German, and he could speak it with a Hungarian accent. He would be as officious and impatient as possible, demand the information, and, when he had it, ride straight for the pilot, even if to the empires farthest border. Most pilots probably would have been demobilized early, and they were likely to live in or near the capital.

  Alessandro's conjectures were interrupted by the arrival of the manure grinders. They looked not so much like prisoners as like oppressed workers. They had been grinding Lippizaner manure for nearly four years, and in that period they had been unable to overcome the normal human affection for the familiar.

  At first Alessandro focused on the two who were neater and more civilized than their colleague, the third, an unkempt giant with fleshy red lips and bulging eyes, but the ordinary-looking ones were set in their ways and would not hear of trading jobs. What if Klodwig were to discover it, as surely he would? Why would Alessandro want to switch in the first place? Why make trouble when they would soon be free? They would have nothing to do with him.

  He turned reluctantly to the giant, in whose bloodshot bulging eyes he could hardly stand to look. "How about you?" he asked.

  "What about me?"

  "Would you like to change jobs?"

  "What for?"

  "All you have to do is walk through the corridors and, now and then, pick up some trays. You can eat the leftover chocolate, shrimp, and rolls, and you hear a lot of music."

  "What's shrimp?" the giant asked.

  "One of the fruits of the sea," Alessandro told him.

  The giant stirred in his seat. "What's the catch? Why do you want to leave your job and take mine? Why should I do it? What do you get?"

  "I get ... terrible headaches unless I have fresh air and lots of exercise. I don't like to work inside, even in winter. Most people aren't as flawed as I am, and would appreciate the ease of my present position."

  "I like my job," the giant said. "We can sleep in the hay, and no one disturbs us."

  "You aren't guarded?"

  "For three men? Why would they bother?"

  "But you could just take a horse and ride away."

  "Who knows how to ride a horse?" the giant said. He moved his head from side to side. "What's in it for me? I never heard of shrimp." His eyes sparkled, at least as far as they could be said to sparkle.

  Alessandro refrained from questioning him, knowing that whatever was rolling around inside of him was going to come out, just as in the case of a man who counts his coins over and over again and never fails to drop at least one.

  "Besides," the giant said, with a corrupt smile, "nothing in your job matches what I have in mine."

  "What's that?"

  "Klodwig's a faggot. All the footmen are faggots. And a lot of our guys, years without a woman, got to be faggots, too."

  "But not you."

  "Not me," the giant said with a smile that dropped a few bombs of drool.

  "Because you," Alessandro said, "you..."

  "What's the matter, can't you say it? Maybe you're a faggot, too. Say it. I do it."

  "You do what?" Alessandro asked delicately.

/>   "I fuck the horses."

  "The male ones also?"

  "Of course not. Just the ladies. I get on a stool, close my eyes, and make believe I'm screwing Quagliagliarella, but when I get home I may never screw Quagliagliarella again. I should work in the zoo. Someday I'll intercourse a rhinoceros, or possibly a giraffe."

  "What about an elephant?"

  "Not elephants. Them and hippopotamuses are not alluring to me. So," the giant said, leaning back. "What can you possibly have up there that's better than what I have here?"

  AT NIGHT, as he walked the deserted corridors of the palace, Alessandro had time to take stock of his situation. In the high boxy halls, the ends of which were so distant from one another that he could not see both at once, pitch-black shadows danced with orange firelight from enameled stoves the size of blast furnaces. This was a place where one might summon ghosts.

  Between the hours of two and six, he rarely encountered a tray, and was free to sit in any one of the forbidden gilt-and-velour chairs that lined his route. Klodwig would have beaten him had Klodwig found out, but Klodwig and his footmen had a pompous step that gave them away in advance of their arrival, and someone moving was far easier to see than someone sitting still. Alessandro had only to make sure not to drift off to sleep. Once, when he had, he was awakened by a footman screaming "Schlafen Sie?," but the footman had been the attendant of a Polish duchess, and had not even known that Alessandro was a prisoner.

  Sometimes Klodwig raced along like a silky bat, hunting sleepy menials, but as he turned corners he gave himself away by the whoosh of air, and in the time it took his eyes to focus, Alessandro would have shifted to his knees on the floor, sweeping crumbs from under the chair in which he had been resting. Klodwig always felt the seat. Thus, as Alessandro swept crumbs, he blew cool air over the upholstery, and it worked.

  A week before Christmas, his plans for escape having gone nowhere, Alessandro stood next to one of the huge stoves, at the end of a corridor half a kilometer in length. The stove was a bulging, smooth, snowy-white thing as high as five men, disgustingly encrusted with gold leaf. As the winds Bernoullied across the chimney pipes they made the flames erratic, and shadows flew about the walls and ceiling like mystically quick fleets of immense black birds.

  It was four-thirty in the morning. At dinner, Alessandro and the other prisoners had heard an orchestra practicing beyond the dining hall of the footmen. Over and over again, perhaps 150 times, with bassoons, oboes, and piccolos embedded within the brass and strings like songbirds in a hedge, they had played the "Swiss Yodeling Song," and now Alessandro could not get it out of his head. It was the perfect accompaniment to the cold mists and snow racing past the palace windows, for beyond the mist and coal smoke were the high mountains covered with blinding ice, where he had always returned to cast off human confusions.

  Swaying slightly to and fro, immeasurably fatigued, the "Yodeling Song" echoing through his soul, he communed with his father. As in life, he told him the news. Though Europe was now at peace, Alessandro was a prisoner of war dressed in a pajama-like costume with red tabs on the cuffs and shoulders. He wandered the halls of the Austrian Imperial Palace from dusk to daylight, picking up trays from which he stole chocolates and shrimp, and sampled the best champagne, warm and flat, from the bottoms of many a bottle.

  Other than that, he subsisted on a diet of potatoes and salt. He slept in the day and at night played a continuous game of catch-me-if-you-can with a bat-like footman in a powdered wig.

  To escape, Alessandro would have to find some way of appealing to a man whose dream was to copulate with a rhinoceros, steal one of the world's most famous and, needless to say, conspicuous horses, ride through Vienna in a purloined uniform, work his will on the Ministry of War by speaking German in a Hungarian accent, find and kill an unknown airplane pilot, and get to the Alps, the white and fatal vastness of which he would cross on foot, all so that he might return to Rome.

  AT SIX in the morning, trying to suppress visions induced by fatigue, and moving slowly to preserve his strength, Alessandro walked past the warm basement kitchens where a thousand things were simmering and baking, cooks were squeezing pastry tubes as if they were wrestling anacondas, and exhausted prisoners were up to their elbows in huge cauldrons scrubbing off caked food in lakes of lukewarm water saturated with soap and muck. They had twelve or fifteen hours to go, and it was not the easiest time of day.

  He passed the cold-rooms and the harness shops, the carpenters' studio, the wig salon, and the hall where legions of footmen waited on call and jumped up like jacks-in-the-box when their bells sounded on a huge mahogany board. He passed the armory, where a thousand well oiled rifles and sparkling bayonets waited in symmetrical rows. And just before the cobblestoned turn in the long tunnel that led up to the Spanische Reitschule in one direction and the Winterreitschule in another, he came to the laundry.

  Thirty copper cauldrons as big as carriages stood over salamandrine flares of flaming methane that swayed slowly back and forth like bouquets of windblown cotton candy. In boiling seas trapped under copper domes were the dresses, shirts, uniforms, underwear, coats, towels, bed linen, napkins, tablecloths, and tapestries of empire. The laundry advertised that it washed in three shifts and never shut down. A line of footmen and chambermaids, some with baskets and others with small carts, faced a long counter behind which half a dozen laundry clerks received or returned the many different items that passed through the kettles. The clerks disappeared into a dark forest of iron racks, and emerged with arms full of clothing or linen. Alessandro stepped into line and observed the procedure.

  Beyond the twenty footmen and maids ahead of him in line were the clerks. Speaking too softly to hear, the maids spoke in laundry code, and shortly thereafter their arms ballooned around sumptuous silk and velvet dresses. The line moved fast, and Alessandro didn't know what to do, until a frail footman put down a colorful uniform spattered with medals and announced that he was leaving it on behalf of Leutnant Fresser. A little old man carried the uniform into the depth and darkness of the racks.

  Several minutes later Alessandro confronted a stout woman with strong hands and spectacles. The old man had dipped back into the sea of garments and was nowhere to be seen, so Alessandro said, as casually as he could, "Leutnant Fresser must have his uniform now."

  "Is it due this morning?" the woman asked, as if to lay down the law.

  "No, it was recently brought in."

  "It takes five days to take it apart, clean it, and sew it back together," the woman said, happy to educate a slave in the ways of upper class laundering.

  "Leutnant Fresser has been called to the field."

  "Just as long as he doesn't blame us for not having finished it," the woman said. She wouldn't move until Alessandro agreed, and he deliberately took his time.

  Then she disappeared, and returned with the uniform held like a newborn on display. "Is this it?"

  "Yes. There's his medal from the battle of Sborniki Setaslava."

  Alessandro hurried away in obsequious steps. Noting that the uniform appeared to be his size, he rolled it up, put it under his arm, returned to the empty barracks, and laid it out under his mattress, where it was safer than the crown jewels of Austria, for who in the world would ever look under the mattress of an Italian prisoner of war?

  Alessandro took a drink of water, brushed his teeth, and threw himself down on the bed. Were he to wait a month or two, or perhaps until spring, he would be released. He wanted, however, to exit the Winter Palace not in a gray line of prisoners, but on a white horse. He wanted to ride across the Austrian countryside and over the mountains not in a third-class carriage, but ahead of the remnants of the pursuing Austrian army.

  He knew that this was because the war was still in him, and that it would be in him for a long time to come, for soldiers who have been blooded are soldiers forever. They never fit in. Even when they finally settle down, the settling is tenuous, for when they close their eyes they see their c
omrades who have fallen. That they cannot forget, that they do not forget, that they never allow themselves to heal completely, is their way of expressing their love for friends who have perished. And they will not change, because they have become what they have become to keep the fallen alive.

  ON ONE of the upper floors was a long corridor with the typical stove at each end. Because it was reached by spiral stairs and led only to a cul de sac in which were three suites, it was seldom used. The guests who were shunted to these rooms were of relatively low station, knew that they were obliged to stay out of the way, and, being from far provinces, went to bed early. On several occasions Alessandro had had the vast hall to himself from dusk to dawn.

  He had brazenly slept upon the carpet and stoked the stoves until they whitened like blast furnaces. The hall was flecked with shadow bursts, and tiny explosions of light went aglimmering from the frosted glass to the angels painted on the panels high above. They winked, their wings fluttered like the wings of hummingbirds, and the sinuous patterns that emerged from the thousands of abrupt beats were like the magical reversals of a rapidly spinning wheel. And the snow, driving at the windows and then disappearing, seemed to have been created for a prisoner hallucinating with melancholy and fatigue.

  Alessandro passed the hours drawn to Rome and the south, his neck stiff with the chore of supporting his head, held unnaturally so that his eyes might capture the unseen light of memory. Electricity coursed through him to the extent that, had he been made of metal, he might have given off sparks. In unguarded conversation the sentries on the Isonzo had alluded to such things, to ghosts and visions that came to them just before dawn, the heart beating on the edge, eyes held open as if with an invisible hook.

  At about three in the morning, as snowflakes churned outside the windows like an artist's exaggeration of a storm at sea, Alessandro heard a faint sound coming from one of the suites. It grew louder, as if whoever was causing it had lost his initial fear of discovery and was consumed by the music of his own making.