A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "What's that!" he asked in the manner of a sailor who sees a sea-monster.

  "What's what?" Alessandro answered, in the manner of an old soldier who will never forget the electricity of an imminent attack.

  "Up there."

  Alessandro turned his head. "The Perseids," he said.

  "The what?"

  "The Perseids, a meteor shower that comes in August. This must be the first day. I didn't see them last night, and last night we were on a high, open ridge where the stars were visible down to where they're dimmed by the mists above the sea."

  "Give me your glasses," Nicolò said.

  When he had put them on, he stared at the sky, looking both contemplative and sharp. Alessandro saw in the way the boy held his head, in the smoothness of his face, and the freshness of his movements, not the image of himself at that age, because it was so long ago that he had almost forgotten, but the image of his son.

  "Where do they come from?" Nicolò asked. "Look! Thousands of them. Like burning magnesium."

  "They drift around in the Solar System," Alessandro told him, "and at this time each year they and the earth collide. They come from the direction of Perseus, and when they strike our air, it lights and burns them. The flashes you see are their last and their brightest. You can look at them all night, imagining that each tiny flash is a man going down, and you won't see the casualties of even a few divisions."

  "They're beautiful," Nicolò said. "They must be so hot, and yet all we can see is a streak of cool light."

  "One of the categories of beauty," Alessandro said not so much to Nicolò as to an unseen audience of his peers, "that Aristotle and Croce inexplicably neglect, is the beauty of that which is lost. How intensely, and with such great loyalty, do we take to heart a life that has no chance of revision."

  "Where do they fall?" Nicolò asked.

  "Most of them simply burn in the air," Alessandro replied, thinking of angels cast furiously through pale and endless light. "Of those that do reach the earth's surface, two-thirds, I suppose, nip into the sea, and the other third sinks into forests or skids across savannahs and steppes."

  "Do they ever fall in Italy?"

  "I'm sure some have fallen in Italy. Probably you can see them in science museums."

  "On cities?"

  "I don't know. Why? Are you worried? Do you think you should wear a helmet?"

  "No, I'd just like to see one after it landed. It really wouldn't know what was going on, would it? Out there in space for a billion years, going at a million kilometers an hour, with no air, no sound, and nothing but the planets moving by. And then, boom! It comes to rest on the floor of a butcher shop in Trastevere, with a bunch of old ladies and a cat backed up against the wall and screaming because it exploded the meat case!

  "I'd feel really sad that after a billion years whistling around space it ended up on a tray of pork chops, but I'd like to touch it to see what it felt like after all that time in the fresh air. La Madonna! I hope it wouldn't bite me!"

  "Wait in the butcher shop," Alessandro told him.

  "I don't know. I'd rather hang around at work. I miss making propellers."

  "But you're not allowed even to touch them."

  "I miss thinking about making them. Someday I'll make them. Why do those meteoroids radiate out like that?"

  "Meteorites. They don't. They just look like they do. They're really parallel and straight, like railroad tracks, which also appear to radiate from a central point."

  Nicolò returned the glasses. "When I get back to Rome," he said, "I'll get some for myself. I've only been gone for two days, and just to think of going back makes me all excited."

  "Rome is like that. It always has been. The city itself is like a family, like girlfriends, lovers, children. I can't tell you exactly why, but it unfolds before you with the grace of water streaming from a fountain. I think that of Rome because for so many years I was either a child, a lover, a father, or a friend, in Rome, and it echoes and echoes, and I'll hear it until I die."

  "What happened? When the woman said, 'Yes, do you know her?' Was it Ariane?"

  Alessandro hesitated, closed his eyes, and smiled. "Yes. And the child by the fountain was my son. I didn't want to frighten him, so I didn't say anything. I reined in my emotions. I didn't pick him up. I bent down and looked at his face—remarkable. How beautiful. How round. Like a chipmunk! His little legs were as fat as sausages. His fingers were so delicate and diminutive that the fingernails were like the smallest, whitest kernels of corn, the pale sweet ones near the end.

  "I said, 'Look, your boat is becalmed, and it's drawn by the currents to the center of the pool. We've got to get a stick.'

  "A street sweeper was not far away. I ran to him and gave him some money, a wad of bills, I think, because I hardly knew what I was doing, and I took a rake from his cart and ran back to the fountain, where I leaned over the water and gently pulled in the sailboat, the sails of which swelled in the breeze.

  "I knew I could not explain to the woman, the cousin whom Ariane had never mentioned, either who I was or what had happened. I contented myself in playing with Paolo as she read the newspaper. It was more than forty years ago, but I remember it so well. We sailed the boat rapidly all along the perimeter, because that was where the sails could pick up the wind.

  "He kept on getting stones in his shoes, and each time he did, I would take off the shoe and dump out the stone. 'What is your mamas name?' I asked. He said, 'Mama!' And when I asked him his father's name, he just looked at me.

  "'Is Ariane home?' I asked the cousin as she was getting ready to leave. 'She should be,' the cousin answered, 'by the time we get back.'

  "'May I walk with you?'

  "'Of course.' The cousin wondered who I was, but she said nothing, and as we walked through the Villa Borghese, and then through the streets, I began to think that I was suffering a cruel delusion, and that, when I saw the boy's mother, I would not recognize her.

  "They lived on the ground floor, and on the doorpost was a highly polished oval plaque with the house number. The cousin rang the bell so Ariane would come out. Were I an undesirable, they could turn me away at the door. Or perhaps the cousin was thinking that Ariane might be in the bath.

  "She was in the bath, and when she appeared to me, after so long, her hair was undone and she was wrapped in a towel.

  "The door opened. It was very strange. All the time that I had been looking for her she had no hint that I might still have been alive. When I was nowhere to be found after the air attack she thought I had been killed with the hundreds who died on the street that ran through the village, many of whom were mangled beyond recognition.

  "The survivors were brought to Trento, and then Verona, and in the confusion I was listed as killed. When I got back to Rome I discovered that the Italian army considered me dead—in Gruensee, in the observation post, and on the Cima Bianca. That I was reported killed three times seemed not to affect their trust in the reports except to strengthen it. Being the army, they must have thought that anyone who was killed three times was most certainly deader than if he had been killed only once.

  "I never altered my status. I was worried about having deserted, and in the years immediately following the war, no one—no former soldier, anyway—was sure that we would not be mobilized again, for whatever reason.

  "Ariane was indeed the woman I saw just before the house was bombed, but my conception of time was wrong. She had run down two flights of stairs, and was rushing out to meet me, but stretchers were blocking the hallway that led to the front, so she turned to go out the back. She heard the bomb smash through the roof. She said it sounded like a basket being broken up before its thrown away. It pierced the ceilings of the third, second, and first floors. She remembered that this sounded like cards being shuffled.

  "It exploded in the front room, and the impact pushed the interior walls, in one piece, against the outside walls of the building, which then collapsed upon itself. At the instant of deton
ation Ariane was at the open door, and the air compressing inside blew her ten meters from the house. She landed on the grass, where she lay paralyzed and hardly able to breathe. Everyone else inside had been crushed, burned, obliterated.

  "And then, suddenly, in Rome, on a calm day in June, she was standing in front of me, in a towel. I held her.... I wouldn't let go. It must have been an hour. She couldn't speak, because every time she tried to say something, she wept. The towel slipped and she was naked in my arms. Though the cousin was amazed, Paolo, our son, held tightly to his mother's neck, because of her tears, and paid no heed to the scandalous circumstances.

  "She cried. Within her crying, sometimes, she laughed, but not much, and the baby cried and stroked her head, and I, I was overcome, but though I was overcome I thought back upon the painting, and my God, Ariane was naked with a child in her arms, and I had found her, and I could not believe it, but it was true, it was certainly true, and if you ask me how or why it happened I can't tell you, but life and death have a rhythm, an alternating rhythm, and you never know what to expect, as it is in God's hands, and I was waiting for a thunderstorm, for the sky to darken, for lightning, and wind. We were as stunned as the people in the Bible upon whom miracles are showered, and even though the thunderstorm did not come until the next night, each and every lightning flash, and each and every thundercrack, was a triumph."

  "THEN IT all came out all right," Nicolò said. "It was all resolved."

  Alessandro looked at him sharply, as if, despite Nicolò's well meaning remark, he was offended.

  "Of course it wasn't resolved," Alessandro said. "You've been listening to me. How can you think that?"

  "You said ... you said you found her, like in the painting. It was perfect: the woman, the child, you had survived the war, you had waited, and you found her. You don't think that's coming out all right?"

  "If it had all stopped then and there," Alessandro told him, "but it doesn't stop, it never stops. And what about all the others: Fabio, Guariglia, the Guitarist, the two Milanese, Rafi? I told you. Look up at the Perseids. You can see them flashing many times a second. They reach the end of their long and silent journeys almost more quickly than you can note, but if you watch them for hours you will not see the casualties of even one group of divisions.

  "Each of the flashes is like the life of a man. We're too weak to feel the full import of such a loss, and so we continue on, or we reduce it to an abstraction, a principle. It would take more than anyone could give to understand the life of one other person—we cannot understand even our own lives—and more energy and compassion than is humanly possible to commemorate even a single life that ends in such a death.

  "You cannot know anything but the smallest part of the love, regret, excitement, and melancholy of one of those quick flashes. And two? And three? At two you have entered the realm of abstraction, and are by necessity thinking and talking in abstractions."

  "How do you mean, abstractions?"

  "I mean, think of a glass of wine that you spend half an hour drinking as it gets dark in the evening, and then think of ten liters of wine, and ten thousand liters. If you can't drink them, they are an abstraction. People throw around abstractions very carelessly because they don't have to live them, and then the abstractions take over their lives."

  "So they do live them," Nicolò said.

  "No, they don't. They live their lives as dictated by their notions, which is usually something very much different, monstrously different. You don't know what I mean, do you."

  "I don't."

  "You know the people who are against war, on principle?"

  "I'm against war, on principle," Nicolò said indignantly, "although I'd like to fight in one."

  "You can't be against it in principle if you can't know it in principle, and you can't know it in principle. You can know only its smallest part, which is enough."

  "So why can't I be against it in principle?"

  "If you claim to know war in principle you're only pretending, and if you can only pretend to know it you can only pretend to be against it. Many people just like to show that they're thinking the right thoughts. And as the 'right' thoughts change like the wind, so do they."

  "So what are you supposed to do?"

  "All you have to know is the story of one of the flashes. That's enough. That's more powerful than any principle. And, look, the worst of it only brings to you early and suddenly what would come slowly and late—so don't exaggerate. I've comforted myself with that thought, which is not very comforting, almost all my life.

  "The problem with war, as I have seen it, is not so much that it makes misery and grief—all of which would tend to come anyway, in time. The sin is in the abruptness, in the abridgement of those stages that otherwise might be joined so brilliantly to make a life.

  "Infants are left without fathers or mothers. Fathers and mothers die with the unbearable knowledge that their children are alone in the world. The love of a man and a woman is neither consummated nor allowed to flare and fade. Generations end, families cease to exist. The line, the story, stops for some, and that, I think, is the worst of it. When your children die before you no recovery exists except perhaps in the inexplicable grace of God, in events that no one has reported, in a place from which no one has ever returned.

  "And in war, as I have known it, the children die and their parents are left to grieve."

  "Not Guariglia's children."

  "No. He perished, but they were saved."

  "What happened to them?"

  "When I got back, the harness shop was still there, but with another harness-maker—he had two legs—and his family. They had bought the stock and trade from Guariglia's widow.

  "I asked where she had taken the children, and the harness- maker told me, 'To get work in the north.' What city? Milano? Torino? Genova? He didn't know. What kind of work? That he knew. Any kind of work, she had told him, whatever it might be."

  "Just like my father and mother, the same thing," Nicolò said. "We got off in Rome because there was a guy on the train platform who gave my father a job in a restaurant. My mother left the train with the babies, and my father passed me and the suitcases to them and the restaurant guy. My father had to jump from the train while it was moving. We got some money back on the tickets, and my father worked in the kitchen of this guy's restaurant. Everything was by chance, nothing by plan. Did you find them? How could you have found them?"

  "I put microscopic advertisements in the back of newspapers. In those days, the newspapers were full of such things. I couldn't afford more than a line or two: Signora Guariglia, Rome Harness Shop, Contact Alessandro Giuliani, and my address. I ran them twice in the first year, twice in the second, then once a year, now and then, far less than the appeals I had published for Ariane, who never saw them."

  "But did Guariglia's wife?"

  "Oh yes, she did. She was in Milano, where she saw the very first one. She clipped it and put it in her sewing box."

  "Why?"

  "Why? You want me to explain to you what goes on in the mind of a Roman harness-maker's widow? I asked her, years later, when finally she got in touch with me. Suddenly, she sent me a Christmas card. She said she didn't know why, it wasn't that she was busy, or afraid that I was a bill collector, but she thought something like that belonged in her sewing box, where she could think about it. She had let it age, you see.

  "She came to see me, with all her children, in nineteen twenty-five. She was married to a foundry worker, and they had enough money, so I started a savings account for the children. I put it in a Milan bank, and every year I added to it. I would take the children to the bank and make the deposit in the office for trust accounts—a more and more sizable deposit as time went on—and then we'd go to a restaurant where, for an hour and a half, I would tell them about their father.

  "The foundry worker was not very comfortable with this, but the swelling trust account, in a blue-and-gold portfolio, eased his nerves. The mother loved Guarigl
ia but she wasn't able to tell the children very much about him. She had always been in a subservient position; he had had to work all the time; and she was the kind of woman who kept yellowed newspaper clippings in a sewing box.

  "But I told them. Every year it was the same. I told them about how brave he was in the line, in the Bell Tower. I told them about the other world we saw together in Sicily; and how their father did well in a combat that might have occurred in the Middle Ages. I told them about the cattle boat, and of how he cut off his own leg in an effort to stay alive—for them.

  "It took some time, as you can imagine. By the end of the meal—it was more than an hour and a half—the restaurant would be empty except for me and the children, and the waiters leaned against the banquettes, linen towels still over their arms, napping, but facing the street in case a customer would interrupt them....By the end of the meal, I had told them about Stella Maris. I always cried when I told them how their father had said, in a clear voice, God protect my children, and they would cry, too. Even when they were older, I would embrace them—in the middle of the goddamned restaurant—but it was all right, because by that time no one else was there and the waiters were too sleepy to notice.

  "They were so young when he died that they might have forgotten him, but I think his picture and the story I told every year had their effect—because, as it turns out, they loved him above all others.

  "One of the girls said to me, At first I loved him like a saint, but then, when I got to know him better as I got older and I could imagine him better, it wasn't like a saint. Saints make you heave with emotion, and then you forget them. I began to miss my father all the time. I would look up and realize that I had been thinking of him, that I wanted him to be there. You never really want a saint to be there, do you?'

  "His children grew up the way he would have wanted them to. And when they had children of their own, I released the trust, and I saw them no more. Now it is their father I think of, from time to time. Perhaps had he not been so physically ugly I would not have loved him so much, and perhaps even his children would not have loved him as they did. He was a good man. He was a man who really broke your heart."