by Mark Helprin
Riding with Alessandro were Germans and Austrians who had been prisoners in the east, Frenchmen trying to get to Paris, thieves, deserters, active units returning to bases and camps, farmers going back to their farms, and fathers coming home to their children. They were dressed in dozens of different uniforms, nonuniforms, military coats without insignia, civilian coats with insignia, and even in blankets stenciled with camp names and directions for putting out fires. They wore helmets with spikes, Italian or British flat helmets, mouton caps, wool socks, and officers' hats, and they carried bundles, packs, and sacks tied with puttee straps and artillery lanyards. After years of painful shaving with hand-held blades, cold water, and no soap, they now had beards in all stages of growth, and they knew that when they returned home in tatters and blankets, with gaunt faces, and eyes that sparkled like stars, they would frighten their families, but that after they bathed and as they gradually put on weight and lost the sparkle in their eyes, their families would slowly understand what they had been through, and would embrace them.
Not everyone had families. Alessandro did not. Still, he found that he lacked certain anxieties, for unlike travelers who are expected he did not have to report home or send telegrams. He could take a side trip to Portugal or Japan and never come back, and no one would miss him. Wherever Luciana was, she could only have heard that he was dead.
As he stared at the moon floating lightly above the mountains he realized that returning homeward all throughout Europe were those who had been given up for lost, who had been mistakenly put on the lists of the fallen, who had disappeared, who had been captured, or left for dead. After all the unexpected reunions, even the families of the dead would take hope, only to be battered by the disappointment of the years that followed.
A hundred thousand miracles lay in wait, and millions of tragedies would have to be relived. Alessandro thought with not a little bitterness of the husbands who would unexpectedly return to their wives, and the fathers who would take their children by surprise as they were playing in the front yard, but when he saw the children freeze, and then run to their fathers' arms, his bitterness left him. The more he imagined the scenes of return, expected or unexpected, the more he wished the best for those who would have such luck, and the more he loved them and their children.
***
LYING AGAINST a mound of straw as he tried to keep the wind from under two blankets that he had bought, Alessandro held the 9mm pistol he had stolen from the sentry, in case someone in the mass of men huddled in the car should dislike Italians or covet what he had left. He tried to think of something to tell the border guards. In the chaos of defeat, the demarcations between Germany and Austria had not faded, and each jealously guarded what remained to it.
The long train had started in Russia where the railway gauges shifted, and was so full of men without papers that Alessandro hoped to be passed over. If he wrote all his answers they might think he was German. Many Germans who had served with the Austrian army had left informally when the end of the war whetted their appetites for home, but Alessandro had no wound on his throat to which he could point, no pink line or star-like scar to explain a lack of speech. Had anyone had any alcohol, he might have feigned intoxication, but he could not get drunk on potato soup. Nor could he successfully pretend feeblemindedness, for then he would be hard put to explain the pistol, the relatively large amount of cash, and the uniform of an imperial officer. The pistol itself was a problem, but were he to hide it he might never see it again, and he needed it.
It was too cold, he was too tired, and the train was now going far too fast for him to jump off. He imagined that if the habits of war persisted he might be arrested and shot as a spy, and it seemed that the war was quite alive. In the absence of one of Orfeo's official documents with a waxen seal as big as a dessert plate, how could anyone really know?
After the previous few years, a border and border guards did not seem insurmountable, and yet he could not get off the train and he was too tired to think of a way to save himself, so he stopped thinking and fell asleep.
When he awoke, the train had halted in the cold winter light that seeps across the mountains at dawn. Even though the doors faced south temporarily and were open upon the advancing sunrise, the air that flowed in was unrelievedly frigid.
As the tips of rifles passed by, Alessandro heard footsteps on the snow, but no one looked inside. He heard the muffled voices of border officials at dawn. The officials were always more awake and assertive than the passengers, but, deep down, they were far more tired.
They were ignoring Alessandro's car. A man had been killed in the one next to it, a bayonet put through his heart because someone had wanted his wool hat, and the body had to be removed.
Then two officials pulled themselves up in a practiced move that left them towering above the men who lay on the straw-covered floor. They had the instinctive cruelty of border guards, but were so puzzled at having lost the war that they found it difficult to be inquisitive. One asked for papers, but left off when a ragged soldier had difficulty unbuckling his knapsack to get them. The other asked if anyone had heard sounds from the next car. He was greeted by silence and the hiss of an idling steam engine. He looked around, judging each face, and when he got to Alessandro he increased his pace, hardly touching him with his gaze. Alessandro, it seemed, looked all right. Besides, at dawn, in the cold, who wanted to step amidst the louse-and-flea-ridden prisoners and common soldiers returning from the east?
He leapt down perfectly and the other guard followed. After a minute or two, another set of officials put their hands against the doors and were about to jump up when someone called to them from out in the field and they changed their minds.
Soon the train was rolling, the sun was up, and Alessandro was sleeping. The blankets were now warm enough, the air was fresh, and they would be in Munich by afternoon. Before he slept, he felt tremendous anxiety about what he was going to do, but the rhythmic pattern of the wheels over the joints in the rails cast him into darkness.
***
MUNICH WAS an enemy city, and a city of art. Snow had fallen heavily the night before, and by early afternoon the winds that had shepherded-in a brittle blue mountain sky attacked vulnerable cornices of snow, blasting them into skittish towers, white whirlpools, and sparkling dervishes formed from sun-catching mist.
The first thing Alessandro saw in Munich was a corpulent beggar, in a restaurant near the station, moving among diners for whom he made silhouette portraits in bread. With two long, narrow, rodentine front upper teeth, he effortlessly sawed the exact profile of anyone who gave him a piece of bread. Alessandro saw him put the finishing touches on a portrait in rye of a woman with a gorgeously pointed nose that seemed to ride far out in front of her face like something floating in the air. The beggar then ate the art and moved on to the next table. Only in Germany, Alessandro thought, could a beggar be fat.
He began to wander, seeking out not the streets that were comfortable and close, but those that, like London's roads, disappeared rifle-straight into a point in the distance. Looking down a long boulevard, he saw trees tossing snow skyward as they were buffeted by the wind. Because of the bright light, he could see ten thousand shining windows and a nearly infinite number of refractions in the detail that the centuries had worked into the stone. The sky was sapphire over Munich and pale white over the Alps as masses of distant snow changed the eye's perception of blue.
Mesmerized by the form and color of peace, he wandered with no object, knowing that eventually he would find a hotel, buy civilian clothes and a newspaper—an Italian newspaper, were one available—and that he would take a bath and pay for extra hot water. Had he not spent four years in war he could not have wandered on the boulevards for many hours in hunger and cold, for cold was something he had learned to endure, and hunger a state he could sustain for weeks. He walked the city, watching the faces of women and children, the old, and others he knew had stayed behind, because they still had antiquated expr
essions of comfort, as if they would never encounter the blackness or blaze into which Alessandros fellow soldiers had risen by the million.
When a flight of geese crossed the sky above him, Alessandro thought of Raphael. As the formation intersected the line of the boulevard, the chain of birds locked wing in quick succession to meet a strong gust of wind and, like a kite's tail following an ascending kite, rocketed upward as if they had been launched from a ramp. In the Loggia of Leo X, in the Vatican, Raphael had sent a V formation of geese vaulting into the clouds with their wings locked to take a violent wind. He had accomplished great feats of perspective and bewildered the eye into believing that a solid ceiling was a row of airy windows on the blue, and in these bright windows he had placed birds struggling in the air. In the central panel, in pale desert colors touched with fire, surrounded by winged angels and cherubim, God is giving the tablets of the law to Moses, but the eye is drawn to left and right to be lifted through the lesser panels that show the open sky. On the left are the geese, gripped by the force of the wind, and on the right, in a nearly empty space, an owl and a swallow. The owl is looking down as if he were perched on the roof and peering inside. The swallow is passing from corner to corner at great speed, close to the imaginary window. He is there only for an instant, but the strength of his extended wings, the length of his narrow double tail, and the bullet-like shape of his body cutting through the wind have branded his image permanently upon the glass.
In his youth Raphael had sung with color and painted with the courage of a soldier, but in later works he had abandoned the exquisite for the deep, and painted as if with his eyes open not to the world but to the far greater field in which the world is set—as if he had begun to see new perspective, new color, new gravity, and new light. And it was all framed as a question, for although he sensed what was beyond, he could not, for the first time in his life, trust his extraordinary vision to tell him what lay there. He was able only to feel, but what he had seen and how he had seen it propelled him on into a darkness filled with questions he could not answer and a gratitude he could not explain. The figures in his paintings suddenly are unsure, and they do not understand what is happening. It is as if they are witnessing a miracle, but the miracle is far from over.
ALESSANDRO FOUND himself, as he had hoped, in a hot bath. He was almost free, but memories still tormented him and images appeared in rapid sequence, vanishing before he could comprehend their completed conversation with his spirit. As he bought new clothing, ate in a restaurant, or arranged for a bath in the hotel, they flew at him like birds in a storm, and he could find no release from their exhausting impact, for each, in some way, touched upon the truth. To awaken in this manner after years of war was too much to bear, and to prevent himself from breaking under the strain he tried to take simple inventories: he spoke to himself about what he had done that day, and took note of the minutiae of the bathroom in which he lay in a steaming tub of hot water all the way up to his blessed collar-bone.
The ceiling rose five meters into a narrow box of darkness filled with clouds of steam. The walls were glossy white, and the temperature of the room not much greater than the temperature outside. In a hopeless attempt to do away with the excessive steam from his extravagantly applied hot water, Alessandro had opened the window a crack. Beyond it was the black of night, and through it came a torrent of air so frigid that the collision between it and rising steam sent white clouds violently curling over the top of the water, spilling from the tub and cascading to the floor.
The tank that heated the water was affixed to the wall. A crown of gas flames roared within its steel base as it gurgled, boiled, and whistled like a tea kettle. From a spout that hung over the porcelain rim of the bathtub as if it were a brass elephant's trunk came a thick stream of hot water that plummeted to the floor of the tub and spread out as it rose. The excess spilled into an overflow, with a sound similar to that of water coursing between two boulders that speed it up until it is silver.
Hot, red, and semi-conscious, Alessandro glanced at the chair that held his new clothes: a pair of leather mountaineering boots oiled for waterproofness, a navy-blue flannel shirt, a Chamonix sweater, a gun-metal-colored parka with the hood rolled into the collar, Dachstein mittens, a heavy wool hat, and an angora scarf. In his Eiger sack were half a dozen chocolate bars, half a kilo of dried beef, a kilo of bread, and some fruit leather. He had a water bottle, a compass, a candle lantern, matches, and extra candles. A pair of crampons was strapped to the pack, and on each side, through loops provided for the purpose, were ice axes, one short and one long.
He had bought these things at a mountaineering equipment store that he had visited before the war and that now had neither customers nor maps. They told him that they would have both only after a treaty, because the mountains and foothills were strategic.
In one pocket of Alessandro's parka were a rail ticket to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and the pistol he had removed from the guard at the Winterreitschule. He hadn't the time to take the extra clips on the soldier's belt, and was therefore limited to ten rounds. One, perhaps two, would have to do for Andri, and with the eight or nine left he would defend himself from the German and Austrian mountain divisions that blocked the way south. He was neither optimistic nor pessimistic of his chances, having learned that in dangerous initiatives, batde, and escape, optimism and pessimism have no place.
Reeling with the sensations of the bath—every so often the dark window would rattle in a gust of wind, or because a train passed on a nearby rail line—he was anything but soldierly. He had had a huge dinner of beef soup, pot roast, potatoes, salad, and beer. He almost fell asleep, and it was difficult to stand up once he had let the water out and gravity back in. In his room, the sheets were cold and white, the air fresh from winter winds that whistled through the cracks. For a moment he lay staring at his clothes and equipment neatly ordered by the bed and illumined in the glare of an electric light. When he turned off the lamp the room was filled with Raphael's colors—the greens and reds that had no name. They came as if to lead him over the walls of the mountains and down into the warmth and glory of Rome.
AS ALESSANDRO walked through the streets of Munich early in the morning the snow was softer than it had been the day before, the sun hotter. He had a soldier's gait, and when he knocked at the major's door his breathing was shallow, as if of rarefied air. He squinted, not because of the light but because the muscles of his face were taut.
The door swung open and revealed a tall man in an Edwardian suit covered by a medical jacket with a caduceus embroidered on the sleeve. The jacket was stained in oil paints of many colors, and the smell of turpentine flooded out the door with the heated air of the house.
At first the former major was puzzled by a man that he thought looked like an English mountain climber. Alessandro pushed him inside, closed the door after them, and drew the pistol. Andri dared not speak.
Alessandro motioned him backward into a large room that looked out through French doors into a garden. In this studio filled with paintings was a three-quarters-finished study of men in the trenches, their backs to the viewer, peering over a landscape of shattered trees and burning brush.
"To hell with you," Alessandro said. "I don't care if your paintings are good or not."
Andri understood his situation, but, like Alessandro, he had been a soldier and was unafraid to die. He had the same feeling that he had had each time he pushed his plane into a dive or sharply banked to attack a group of enemy fighters. He smiled half bitterly and said, "I see that the war has done wonders for art criticism. You used to be relatively sheepish, but now you get right to the point. You've come to avenge an action in the air."
"Yes," Alessandro answered.
"Were you a pilot?"
"An infantryman."
"The strafing of the Col di Lana? Your trenches were badly laid out. For us, it was a field day. You had only one anti-aircraft: gun, and it stopped firing. I could understand your being here if you we
re in the Col di Lana."
"It wasn't the Col di Lana."
"The Kleinalpenspitze?"
Alessandro shook his head.
"The Grossen Schonleitschneid? What you call the Dolomiti di Sesto?"
With each wrong guess, Andri felt that he was digging his grave a little deeper, but that it would have been worse to stop.
"In the Brenta?"
"Yes."
"The mounted column at Gruensee."
"Not the mounted column, they were soldiers."
"What, then?" Andri asked, lifting his shoulders.
"The hospital."
"My bombs went astray," Andri said with a tiny bit of indignation, and most convincingly.
"The column was hard between the buildings."
"That's your first lie."
"It isn't."
"It is. I was there. I saw it. The column had scattered, nothing was left to bomb; yet you came back. You flew at a cross-angle. The hit was direct."
"That's not so!" Andri insisted.
"But it is so," Alessandro added quietly. "I read the operational report that you wrote."
"How could you have?" Andri asked, shifting from indignation to something that was a combination of panic and irritation. "How did you find me? That's how you found me? You got the report from the Austrian army? Are they insane?"
"Remarkable, isn't it," Alessandro stated rather than asked, "that the masters of the bureaucracy are the masters of the world."
"Things happen in war," Andri said, trying to save his life. "Neither side has a lock on virtue." He despaired. "You've come to kill me."
"I have."
"What a waste. I could paint. I could paint for forty years."
"You're going to die."
"What good will it do?"
"I don't think of it that way. For me it's purely justice—not so much utilitarian, but aesthetic. Consult your texts on symmetry. The good that it will do? Maybe, in another war, you would have bombed another hospital."