A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "You're not so clean anymore, Signore. You're covered with dust, and your eyes are like the eyes of a wolf."

  Alessandro smiled. "Like a wolf?"

  "Like a wolf."

  "All right, I'm not clean, my heart is failing, and I'm lying on the ground, but I can talk. I'm talking, am I not, with some speed?"

  "You're windmilling," Nicolò said.

  "Good," Alessandro returned. "That can't be unpleasant to you, considering your profession."

  "Tell me about Orfeo before you die," Nicolò said, playing a part.

  "I won't die until it's hot."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I want to, and I will."

  "If you hadn't told me about your heart, I would never know."

  "I want to."

  "Why?"

  "I'm ready."

  "You're tired of living?"

  "I was tired of the world a long time ago, and I'm running half in another realm right now. It isn't unpleasant; it isn't dark. Quite to the contrary, it's a land of light, and soon I'll have to ask you if I'm floating."

  "Do you want me to stay with you?"

  "No. When it gets light, go back on the road and go visit your sister. Is she pretty?"

  "A little bit."

  "I wish I could have met her, but she wouldn't have understood. She probably would have been distrustful, or at least shy."

  "I don't think so. She used to be a whore."

  "What could be more shy than a whore in a convent?"

  "She had to do it, but only for six months. A tower buckled when my father was on top fastening the lines. He was unconscious for a month, and he couldn't walk for a long time after that. He never knew. She told him she worked in a cafeteria, and she changed her clothes in the hotel. As soon as he got a job making bricks, she stopped. I shouldn't have told you—she'd kill me—but you told me about Orfeo."

  "Let me finish, then, so we'll be even.

  "Why did he live in a cave in the Testaccio? I don't know. You would think he would have been smart enough to have ordered a billion lire into a secret bank account in Switzerland, and retire there—like every Italian who does something like that—surrounded by bodyguards, Doberman pinschers, and women with huge breasts.

  "But no, he lived in a tiny room hewn from a mountain of potsherds. He used to talk about the whitened bones in the valleys of the moon. Perhaps he thought he was living in a mountain of bones, and that the exalted one was going to go there to pick him up. Well, the exalted one did.

  "He had two windows and a door at the front of the cave, and the windows had garish yellow-and-purple curtains: irises and daffodils. I never notice things like shoes and curtains, I see right past them, but these were magnetic. As I stood at the gate of the little garden in the front of his house, I saw him peeping from behind those hideous curtains.

  "He didn't know I was watching him, and he thought that I didn't know that he was watching me. His expression was one of deep concentration and concern, like that of an animal, used to running free, that suddenly discovers it is trapped.

  "I could see only a quarter of his face at a time, but he moved around enough so that eventually I saw every part. His black hair was slicked down, and he looked nimble and well pressed. He was old, but he was the kind of man who can do a backward somersault until he's ninety. I thought that, with fascism, we were certain to have another war, and, thus, I had an overwhelming desire to get rid of him.

  "I waited for several months, and I grew a beard. Ariane was polite, but she preferred me without it. Paolo was amazed and amused. I promised to shave before the autumn. Under an assumed name, I joined a swimming club near the Tiber. It was a horrible club, always crowded and chaotic, especially when the students of a nearby liceo were released. A pool designed for seven lane-swimmers would suddenly be burdened with a hundred screaming adolescents. The changing-rooms were so tumultuous that no adult in his right mind would go near them. Good. Part of my plan.

  "I went to look at the hovel next to Orfeo's; it was empty. An old woman sitting inside another hovel told me that if I wanted to rent it I should talk to the owner of an expresso bar near the Mattatoio.

  "It was a bar for the slaughterhouse workers, and I reeled from the smell as I walked to the counter. The waiter there went to get his boss.

  "'I'm a clerk in a rubber factory,' I told the boss, 'and I work the night shift. My mother had an accident getting out of a boat in Ancona, which is where we live, so she can't clean fish anymore, and I have to support her.'

  "'What has that got to do with me?' he asked.

  "'I took a day job typing orders for a furniture company. They do a lot of business in Greece, and since my father was born in Greece, he speaks Greek, and I know some Greek, and although my typewriter doesn't type Greek, I write things in Greek underneath what I type.'

  "'Why are you telling me this!' he screamed. He thought I was a maniac. He looked like Mussolini. I think he cultivated it.

  "'My landlady in Trastevere likes to sleep in the daytime,' I said. Then I paused. I was going to make him remember me forever. 'She says I can't type in my room. I took a table into the street, but it was too crowded to work there.'

  "He was going crazy. Then I closed it. 'I need a place. Your rooms in the Testaccio are perfect. It's quiet there all day.'

  "'Ah!' he said. 'But you'd leave quickly.' He sounded disappointed. 'There are a lot of lunatics there.'

  "'Are they dangerous?'

  "'Who knows? It's not for normal people.'

  "'My poor mother,' I said. 'The furniture company compensates me generously because they don't have to provide me with an office. Because of that, I can pay you well.'

  "When I told him how much, which was three times the best he could hope for, he ran to get the key. As the barb in the hook, I paid him for several months in advance.

  "'I hope your mother feels better,' he said, in a tone that proved that even someone who looked like Mussolini could be ingratiating.

  "I intended to make it so the police would not even look for the murderer, or at least not very hard, but, if they did, they would be looking for a bearded single man, of Greek extraction, who lived in Trastevere, was a clerk in a rubber factory, and whose mother had recently had an accident in a boat in Ancona."

  "What about fingerprints?"

  "I didn't plan to leave any. Besides, my fingerprints weren't on record, and even had they been, I wasn't a suspect, so they wouldn't have thought to compare them. At that time, anyway, the police were still used to the Bertillon system, and slow to use the new techniques.

  "For a month I approached the swimming pool via the Ponte Sublicio, from Trastevere, where I stopped at a coffee bar and talked endlessly about typing furniture orders. Every time I came in, the bartenders heart sank. Once, on the way home, I bought a hammer and a crowbar, telling the ironmonger that I was going to make repairs on a place in the Testaccio that I had rented to type up furniture orders, and all the rest."

  "You got away with it, didn't you."

  "Yes, I did," Alessandro answered, "in more ways than one, because, although I killed him, I didn't have to go as far as I had intended. He jumped the gun. He did it for me."

  "He did?"

  "Yes."

  "He committed suicide?"

  "No. I'll tell you.

  "I had intended to set up a table and a typewriter—that I bought, naturally, in Trastevere—in the ragged patch of garden in front of the hovel that I had taken. I knew that Orfeo would not be able to tolerate the sound of the keys clicking, and the leads striking what he called the infernal rubber roll. In the middle of the day, a few people were working in their gardens, scavenging, or sitting about like heliotropes. They were to have been the witnesses when Orfeo lost control and attacked me with my own renovation tools, which would be conveniently nearby when the agitated rhino broke through the decrepit fence between his plot and mine.

  "I was going to let him wound me. Everyone would see my blood before
his, and, of course, he would be completely berserk, whereas I would be only amazed.

  "But you can't engineer things like that. They happen in their own way, and so did this.

  "I arrived at about ten-thirty. The sun was high, and three or four idle people had their eyes fixed upon my every move. I couldn't see Orfeo, but I heard him talking to himself, which I took as a favorable sign.

  "Within minutes of my first key-stroke he charged out the door, as enraged as a blast furnace. The eyes, mouth, hands, feet, and arms were moving without a plan, but the legs carried the fuming, bubbling barrel out into the street and into my yard.

  "He didn't recognize me. It was probably because of my beard and the smoked glasses I wore, an unusually shaped pair of a type that I had never worn until that day and have not worn since.

  '"Will you please! Please! Stop that disgusting noise!' he shouted in a manner at once so obsequious and so violent that it was new to me, and I could not help but liken it, on the spot, to burning oil. 'Everyone knows that certain practices,' he said, 'and certain machines, infernal machines, have no place in residential areas. Will you please! The typewriter was brought from Egypt, and it has ruined more fine people than you can imagine. My colleagues have vanished into its maw. Stop it, or I'll kill you.'

  "I stopped, he left, and, as he was gliding over the threshold I struck again, tapping out a monotone tattoo. He began to smash things inside his house, and people came out to the street to see what was happening.

  "Orfeo was bellowing, laughing, screaming—all with a self-imploding tension that told me an attack was imminent. I had to exert tremendous discipline to continue typing a list of different-sized dowels and corner clamps, but I kept at it.

  "Orfeo staggered out his front door, and, just as I had thought, burst through the fence. He stood before me, twitching in compressed rage. I saw that he had something in his hand, and I was alarmed because I thought it was a gun. Crazy, angry, strange people don't shoot straight, but at that range I had no reason for overconfidence.

  "It wasn't a gun, it was a grenade. Grenades have always made me very nervous, and I immediately stood up. I suppose you've never thrown one?"

  Nicolò shook his head.

  "You never get used to it, no matter how many times you've done it. When you pull the pin it really perks you up, and when you toss the grenade and you hear the warning detonation, your spine feels like a Van de Graaff generator.

  "That's what it feels like when you throw it. The ambiance is more intense when someone throws one at you. You have to count the seconds—and you never do it accurately—from the first pop, if you're lucky enough to have heard it. Then you have to figure out if you're going to try to toss it back, seek cover, or just hit the ground and roll up into a ball.

  "Someone with experience will hold the grenade in his hand after it's primed and let it live half its life before he throws it. On the Isonzo, the Germans would delay it long enough so that it would explode in the air above the target.

  "Orfeo pulled the pin, and I began to think that perhaps I was not so clever after all. In the corner of my eye I could see that my witnesses were frozen in place, with their mouths hanging open.

  "I backed off. Orfeo strutted forward, his face moving in a hundred independent directions, an abysmal recitation coming from his lips. He was not after me, but the typewriter.

  "His eyes narrowed as he approached it. He cursed, spit, and trembled, and, with a primeval growl, he slammed the grenade into the cradle. I heard the first detonation, as the handle was re-leased. He had probably never thrown a grenade, and had kept his fingers around the lever merely by chance. When it popped, he thought it had exploded, and he reflexively pulled back his arm.

  "His sleeve caught on the part with which you advance the roller and return the carriage. He was wearing a black wool jacket with a threadbare open weave, and the chrome bar went right through it.

  "As Orfeo backed up, the typewriter flew off the table and smashed him in the knees. He screamed. He kicked the typewriter and swatted it with his free hand. 'Let go of me! Release me!' But the grenade was inextricably lodged in the typewriter, and the typewriter held tight to Orfeo.

  "When he realized that the machine was going to do more than merely bang him in the knees, and that he could not let go, and that it was only a matter of seconds until his flesh and the many thousand pieces of the typewriter would mesh and intermingle in the final cocktail of his existence, he smiled and he began to laugh.

  "His last words were spoken as if he had finally discovered what he had been seeking all his life. You know what he said? He said, 'Moles dash in the wind!'

  "I fell to the ground behind a pile of amphora handles. Another second passed, and I heard a tremendous explosion. Orfeo and the typewriter rained down upon the Testaccio in a way that I had seen a hundred times in the trenches, and I thought to myself, good, now a little bit of war has come home to the paper pusher.

  "Though I had once regarded him with affection, I felt no regret. I had been hardened and crazed, and in that way I was able to pass on some of what I'd seen, instead of taking the blow alone. Its a kind of sacrilege, in modern times, that the walls be breached between the common soldier and the bureaucrats and clerks who send him to his death. You aren't supposed to make the connection, and they, the clerks, are supposed to be immune.

  "But you take a soldier, and you blood him, and no one is safe, not even the generals. I thought that what was good enough for Fabio and Guariglia would also be good for Orfeo, and I made sure of it.

  "I went to the swimming pool, and in a crowd of several hundred shouting adolescents I shaved off my beard at a sink in a cubicle half hidden in the steam. No one noticed.

  "I swam a hundred laps, and changed into a white suit. I put my other clothes in a paper bag, and threw them in the trash. On my way home through the Aventino, I passed the police on several occasions. They didn't even look my way. I was numb. I had done it. I had actually killed a bureaucrat.

  "Ariane told me that I seemed somewhat shaken, but I said that it was merely that, having shaved, I felt strange. A day in the sun, I said, and I would no longer look like a peeled apple.

  "And Paolo—he was happy to have his father again. In my foolishness, whenever I glanced at him I felt elation, because I had imagined that I had cleared his future of war.

  "As the years slowly passed and I realized that I had been suffering an illusion, I felt some regret about Orfeo, but when I felt regret about Orfeo it was not difficult for me to shift my remorse, and to remember those who had gone before him."

  "THE SUN is about to rise," Alessandro said.

  Nicolò turned his head, like an owl, to the west.

  "In my experience," Alessandro told him, "it has always risen in the east, which is that way." As he pointed east his arm seemed so straight and still that Nicolò would not have been surprised had a banner suddenly unfurled along its length. "Of course, I'm willing to be open minded. Why not? I'll check the south and the north. You watch the west."

  "I know the sun comes up in the east," Nicolò said, "where the moss is. I just didn't know where the east was, that's all.

  "Is."

  "Is what?"

  "The east is. It never ceases to be the east."

  "How do you know it's there?" Nicolò asked.

  "We've been walking from north to south. At every step the east was to our left and the west to the right. I felt it without letup, and each time I turned from the north-south axis I felt the pressure, and the card would swing."

  "You're a compass?"

  "One of the great joys in my life has been knowing where I've been, where I am, where I'm going, and in which direction I face. We get our idea of angels from the birds, and they are masters of direction not by accident but because they have a high perspective. The world is less confusing when seen from above, and at the great speed at which they fly and turn, gravity and magnetism are exaggerated. Birds can feel the inertia of direction."
/>   "How do you know about birds?" Nicolò asked, for it was hardly the first time that Alessandro had referred to them.

  "I spent a long time watching them when I myself was so broken that I felt no sense of human superiority."

  "Do you now?"

  "How could I feel superior to something like a swallow, that rises so fast and falls with such abandon again and again, learning quickly and simply what life demands, and staying aloft despite what it knows."

  "Did you watch them with a telescope? Did you have a guidebook, like an Englishman?"

  "No. They came close. I didn't need a telescope. And I wasn't interested in collecting sightings. Quite frankly, I was uninterested in what you can know of them from books. I admired the extraordinary qualities that are obvious and apparent—that they are able to wheel in the blue and float among the clouds, and yet they always choose to return to earth, to nests of straw on spattered beams under the eaves of barns and churches; that, despite what they have seen, they are silent, except for singing; that though they are the emblem of freedom they have families; that they possess unimaginable power and endurance, and yet they sleep serenely and are, for the most part, as gentle as saints.

  "I watched them on terraces and rooftops, in woodsheds, in forests and fields, on ledges like these, from the railings of ships, and from cliffs above the sea. When my son was little, we spent years outside—in the mountains, on the plain that surrounds Rome, in the fields, and floating down rivers. What a life we had. I would have considered it impossible. Most people, free to do almost exactly as they wish, would never understand the way we lived."