A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "He stayed alive for ten minutes. He was conscious, and felt no pain, because he was too far along to feel pain, but he knew he was dying and he felt the holy terror as he slipped away.

  "Father Michele went to him, for this was the job, after all, that Father Michele had chosen. He had a bunch of memorized things that he could say, things that had been tested over centuries, and that worked, and that were expected. He was supposed to administer last rites so that he could save the boy's soul.

  "I've told you, though, that he took everything for what it was, and judged everything anew. He didn't do what he was supposed to have done. We watched from the doorway, with the door ajar.

  "He had gathered the boy in his arms, and he was bathed in his blood, but he held him the way you would hold a baby, and he cried, and he talked to him until he died.

  '"I can't see,' the boy said. 'I can't see.' That was the only time that Father Michele quoted the Bible to him. He said, 'Like ... a swallow ... mine eyes fail with looking upward.' The soldier was dying quickly. His soul was halfway to another place.

  "The priest said, 'Where you are going there is no fear and there is no dying. Your mother and your father will be there. They'll hold you like a baby. They'll stroke your head, and you'll sleep in their arms, in bliss.'

  "'I wish it would be so,' the boy said.

  "'It will be so,' Father Michele answered, and he repeated it again and again, 'It will be so, it will be so,' until the boy died.

  "Afterward, when he was clean, I approached Father Michele and asked if he believed what he had said. 'No,' he told me, 'but I was praying to God to make it that way.'

  "'Aren't you supposed to shut up and expect certain things—blackness if you're an atheist; overwhelming light if you believe?'

  "'I suppose one is,' he answered, 'but I took the risk of telling God to His face that He had faltered in the design, that the boy who died today was not in need of splendor, but only of his mother and father. Perhaps I'm a heretic, but I'll deal with that after the war.'

  "I found him. It was easy. The Church always seems to know where its priests are, even when they're traveling. He remembered me. His hair had turned almost all gray, but he still had his kindly, hesitant manner.

  "I told him the truth, exactly what had happened.

  "'The child was conceived out of wedlock,' he said, 'but the child's father was supposed to have been killed in the war. If you marry the mother now, you can adopt him. Then we will "discover" that he is not merely your adopted son, but your natural born son. So, he was your son, he is your son, he will be your son, you will have married his mother, you will have returned from the dead,' he said, counting on his fingers. 'What more can you want? Five out of six. I have no more fingers on this hand.'

  "'I don't want him to suffer illegitimacy,' I said.

  "'He won't'.

  "'Why?'

  "'I'll take care of it.'

  "'How?'

  "'I don't know, but I will.'

  "And he did."

  "How?" Nicolò asked.

  "He argued for a dispensation, and he got it. The Church made many an exception during the war, and after. The whole world was shattered and I suppose the Pope was trying to put it back together."

  "So you married her."

  "Of course I married her. Remember what I told you about red on the bride's cheek? I was speaking from experience. She wore a very simple wedding dress; we could afford nothing more. The ring was so thin that it looked like wire. She had no other jewelry, but her hair crowned her face, and through the front of the dress you could see the top of her chest, which was always so beautiful, especially when she blushed. Underneath the satin lace, it looked like a bed of roses.

  "Just to think about her makes me happy. When I die, no one will think about her ever again, which is why I've been holding on. On the other hand, if they've all gone somewhere, should I not be delighted to join them, even if it means nothing except to be extinguished? At least I'll have the knowledge, as I slip into the dark, that I'm following, and that I have been loyal in my affections."

  "Did you sleep with her?" Nicolò asked.

  Alessandro looked at him in disbelief. "Of course I slept with her! She was my wife! I was married to her for thirty-three years!"

  "What was it like?"

  "You must really be desperate," Alessandro said.

  "No," Nicolò protested unconvincingly.

  "I should shoot you for asking such a question."

  "You have a gun?"

  "No, I don't have a gun, but surely you don't expect me to tell you about a private matter like that."

  "Why not? You loved her. You said she was beautiful. You talked all around it. Why not?"

  Alessandro thought. "All right," he said. "Why not? It's all upwelling to the surface anyway, and if I don't tell you it will vanish with me, into the air, like smoke, whereas, if I tell you, it won't. Perhaps she would be pleased.

  "When I was young, I was a good rower, I rode horses, I climbed, I fenced, I was as fit as a leopard. Once, in Bologna, I had an affair with a woman who worked in the library. We lived in the same building, so I would nod to her when I passed the acquisitions desk, or when I met her at the door in the hallway. I won't tell you her name."

  "She must be seventy years old!"

  "That's not the end of the world. She's probably closer to eighty. She has a memory, don't you think? Anyway, I never associated her with sex or physical desire, although she was pretty enough, and I suppose no one else did, either. I never saw her with another person, and she was always very busy, and always modestly dressed, even in summer. You could hardly tell she was a woman.

  "One night in July I was coming down from the roof, where I had gone to sleep because it was so hot in my rooms. At about four in the morning, ash and cinders had begun to rain down on me, probably from a blacksmith's shop where they were trying to get their work done and fires out before midday.

  "As I lurched down the stairs, dressed only in rowing shorts, carrying a cotton blanket and a sheet, her door opened about a finger-length. I stopped to peer into the darkness, and as I did, the door swung open fully, revealing this woman, with her hair down, her glasses off, her face flushed, and her eyes narrowed."

  Nicolò's eyes were dancing like glowworms.

  "Maybe I shouldn't tell you this," Alessandro said.

  "Oh come on!" Nicolò almost screamed.

  "It's just by way of illustration. I'm not going to be lewd, not on the day I die."

  "Illustrate! Illustrate!" the boy said.

  "She was wearing a cotton thing—I never know what to call women's clothing—that had no sleeves, and came up only to just under her arms and down to the top of her thighs. It was supposed to be held up with a string, but the string was untied and its two ends were between her breasts. The only thing that kept the garment from sliding to the floor was the fact that her nipples were stiff and erect."

  "What did you do?" Nicolò asked, hardly able to breathe.

  "What did I do?" Alessandro echoed contemptuously. "That's the stupidest question I ever heard in my life. I threw myself upon her and she devoured me with every part of her body that could move or be moved. Though it was extraordinarily pleasurable, I felt like a downed wildebeest set upon by a pride of lions. She was everywhere at once. Every touch, at first only for her, and then for me, put out ten aggravating fires but started fifteen more. She may have worked in the library but she loosed everything upon me in pitchers-full, with moaning, hyperventilation, finger sucking, and all that.

  "Every night for a month. Then I went to the mountains, and when I returned she was gone. I never saw her again.

  "I tell you this only by way of illustration."

  "Of course. Was it like that with Ariane?"

  "No. The library woman, whom I have always remembered as a succubus..."

  "What the hell is that?" Nicolò asked.

  "It's Latin. Look it up. She had me stand on her bed one evening, naked. T
hen she walked around the bed, with her eyes riveted on me, and she exploded again.

  "I could be regarded that way only by a woman slightly akilter in the heat of July, but her adoration opened channels in me, and in her, that were—how shall I say it—quite wide and quite deep.

  "I adored Ariane with the same excitement, but with much greater conviction. Of course, we lived in special circumstances. We thought we had lost one another, and when we found that we had not, we were able to be entirely free. I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Without heat or shock, it can't be done. I believe that's why sexual love, which needn't be, is so intensely intertwined with sin.

  "When Ariane—the woman whom I have loved nearly all my life—and I made love, we reversed the common expectation. Usually, you see, there's a lot of motion over a very short time, but we hardly moved at all, and it went on for hours. We held together, amazed, locked like cats. And though we would hardly move, we would sweat, flesh to flesh, and our engagement was so tight, stiff, and exhausting that it was hallucinatory.

  "She had beautiful, perfectly shaped, glacially white teeth, and when they were wet with saliva they glistened, and I thought of them as the gate to her soul. I kissed them, and I kissed them, and I kissed them. I loved her."

  "I've never touched a woman," Nicolò said, in deep despair.

  "You will. It'll take you years to learn what to do—not because it's a matter of technique, but precisely because it isn't. It's a matter of deep understanding, and of love. Nowadays, people have a problem with sex, I think. Popular culture is obsessed with it. It has become almost a sickness. It never was when I was a boy, and when I was in my prime.

  "Everyone seems to have forgotten that sexual love exists for two purposes," he said, "to unite a man and a woman, and, there fore, to make babies. If you don't understand this, your pleasure will be merely superficial."

  "That's what the Pope says!" Nicolò stated with the urgency of a pheasant leaping from cover. "That's exactly what the Pope says."

  "And he's right, though how he knows is anyone's guess. "Why do you think priests are celibate? Yes, yes. To devote themselves to God, but what does that mean? It means that they don't have to choose between God and family. It means that, at the end, they're free to go to glory and beams of light and all that—because, you see, if they had a wife and children, all the ecstasy and beams of light would not be enough."

  "You're really an old guy, aren't you?"

  "I am. You, on the other hand, are modern. You are at the very top of the hill of history, looking back and down. You see old people like me in outlandish clothes, moving stiffly and stupidly, and you, you can do immortal cartwheels. I remember that. I remember the pleasure that came purely from the enjoyment of moving my limbs—like an electric current, a happy electric current."

  "Yeah."

  "But what will you look like to the generations that will supersede you? For one, they won't be able to tell the difference between you and me. We'll be the same, we, who are so modern, the culmination of all human graces, we, who wear glass crystals in frames resting in front of our eyes, whose teeth are inlaid with gold and silver, whose skin is painted with pictures of beasts and ships, who wear coats of animal skin and fleece, and walk about with our feet wrapped in the scraped hide of cows; we, who blow ourselves up with grenades and bombs, and carry lit tubes of burning leaves so that we may inhale the smoke, who imbibe with rapture the juice of rotted fruit, and then vomit on the street, and who lovingly eat live molluscs, raw meat, and old goat's milk riddled with mold."

  "You're just jealous."

  "Maybe."

  "I never met a guy who agrees with the Pope about sex."

  "Not a hundred percent."

  "How many?"

  "Seventy-five."

  "You believe seventy-five things?"

  Realizing that Nicolò had no understanding of percentages, Alessandro said, "Yes, I do."

  "You expect me to believe them, too."

  "I don't care. It's up to you. I have my own problems."

  "But usually old guys like you want everyone else to believe what they do—and watch out if you don't."

  "The dumb ones, the ones who have burnt out."

  "What about priests?"

  "It's their job, like making propellers, or cleaning steeples. A job always conquers your reticence. And the best ones, like Father Michele, never seem to care about how you think—although they really do, but they leave it to you."

  "So you don't care what I do?"

  Alessandro threw his hands up. "I hope the best for you. You'll have to make a thousand correct decisions and weather ten thousand mistakes, but I won't be there. I wasn't there even for my son."

  "He was your only son?"

  "Yes."

  THE SUN cleared the eastern ridges of the Apennines, having pushed a crescent of itself over the inflamed hills as if to begin its white barrage from a firing slit. Alessandro squinted at it, having saved his eyes all his life to see now that its surface was like a pocket in the waves under a high wind, swirling in contradiction and counterpoint within an arc as luminous and clear as crystal. It ascended in perfect containment, its detonations noiseless, its fires compressed, and it floated over the mountains, flooding them with light.

  "I realize only now that I have been cold," Alessandro said as the sun's heat warmed him. "Have you ever wondered what the stars would be like up close?" he asked Nicolò. "They would be like this," he said, shielding his eyes, finally, with his hand. "As you reached them and you sailed by, they would flare and burn, their gases in tumult like the pool under the piston of Niagara.

  "The sun is what starts Rome in the morning. The sun pushes the buses out of their garages, unfurls the sails of boats, and opens the office doors. It puts all those little cars on the highways, their engines yammering like uncontrollable bowels. I hate cars, I've always hated cars. They're ugly. They're ugly, anyway, compared to a horse, which is beautiful. They make the air wavy and dirty with their exhausts, and now the whole city rumbles when once it was silent enough for the wind to be heard in the trees."

  "You sound like Orfeo," Nicolò told him.

  "No. I've adjusted to the way things are, but I've never forgotten the way they were. He, the little maniac, never adjusted to the way things were, but he forgot entirely the way they had been. He was foolish not to have fallen in love with the typewriter. Someday, the typewriter will be obsolete, antique. He should have known that.

  "When I was a boy, most of the country around Rome was good for hunting. You could ride to the sea through forests and fields, and never see a road. The fields were deep green, and, where ditches cut through them, or a riverbank was exposed, the red was very rich.

  "Two months ago, in June, I took an afternoon walk and continued on into the night."

  "Oh! You do that?"

  Alessandro smiled. "I guess I do. At four in the morning I crossed the new ring road they're cutting around Rome. Men were working under banks of electric lights. As their machines roared, they seemed possessed, like squadrons of infantry pressed beyond endurance, running on will and fear. They clenched their teeth as they attacked a hill. They blasted and cut, and before they got down to the chalk that filled the air with dust and smoke they had to cross-section a clay bank. There, as the machines whined, I saw the same color red that I had known when the land now a highway was a long alley of pheasants in golden brush.

  "If you cut into a limb of the modern world, the blood is the same. I had seen that on the Isonzo, but the lesson was late in coming."

  "But what about your son?"

  "When I was in training, before I knew what it was going to be like, even though I had read of the carnage in France—you simply cannot understand until you face it yourself—they marched us to a theater in Lucca, half a day from camp...."

  "Signore..."

  "We thought the march was a field exercise or part of our physical training. They n
ever tell you anything. They're like God. You learn to live in mystery and anger.

  "We carried half packs and bayoneted rifles. I don't recall the organization of the training cadres, but we were about two thousand men. Rain threatened all morning, and now and then a huge dusty drop would smack you in the face, but the sky didn't break until after we got to the theater.

  "Half of us marched in, and the other half was drawn up into ranks out front. The theater had just been remodeled, and the architects wanted to test the acoustics. For this they needed bodies, and the military analogy must have struck them, as indeed it should have.

  "As soon as we had taken our seats we had our first view of war—an argument of epic proportion between the stage manager and architects on one side, and our major on the other. The civilians were unhappy that their test, for which they had positioned all kinds of meters and cones to measure and absorb the sound, would be biased by the forest of bayonets that shot upward from the seats.

  "Two acoustics idiots made the mistake of attacking and insulting the major in front of half his men. He could not possibly back down. 'Unsheathe bayonets!' he screamed out to us. The sheaths came off, truly, in a flash. The noise was chilling, and the smell of gun oil immediately filled the air.

  "I remember the expression of the two idiots. They, like everyone else in the world, hadn't realized what they were up against, and they also didn't know that our major was having fun. 'First and Second Battalions, Fanteria, stand.' We stood, in unison. In unison, the seats sprang back. 'Ready!' he barked. Our rifles were raised to our shoulders. 'Aim!' he shouted.

  "We aimed at the two acoustics idiots. We hadn't loaded, but they didn't know anything. The major looked at them and said, 'Please be so kind as to present the full body of your concessions and apologies,' and when they had, the major ordered us to remove the bayonets.

  "With peace restored, they began to test. The theater grew dark, the curtain lifted, and though the stage was empty, the lights, in all their marvelous and exciting colors, rose into an expectant glow, and into the circle they made came a young woman. A murmur arose among the thousand recruits. Most audiences at the opera are not armed, and they have not been deprived of femininity for months on end. She was as nervous as a candle in hell, but then the orchestra began to play, and she sang.