by Mark Helprin
In planning the mission it had been assumed that the Germans, understanding the potential of naval gunfire, would do all in their power to keep their formations in flux, put up heavy flack to bring down observation planes, and comb the hills for spotters. But brush-clad hills are hard to comb, especially if they are covered with sharp thorns. The roof was another thing. If the battle turned, they might very well come onto this roof, which meant that for him the sound of trucks would be more ominous and arresting than the sound of tanks.
Once the tanks had passed and gone a little farther north he heard them idling before they pulled off the road and dug in, and, after a few moments, the air was filled with shouts, commands, the changing of gears, gunning of motors, and clinking of treads. Then, one by one, the tanks turned off their engines. He wanted to see them before their crewmen finished positioning and would take stock of what was around them. He would have to peek over the parapet, and even had his head been no bigger than a woodpecker’s its appearance above the perfectly regular line could be seen from a great distance.
He began to get up in the normal way. Fit young soldiers hardly think of the byzantine conspiracy of muscle, tendon, and bone required for moving the live weight of a body in defiance of gravity. The muscles of the abdomen and the back are linked to an interdependent frame that, if partially shattered, will not move without considerable protest. The pain that came from the first lifting of his head and the partial twist of his shoulders—merely to raise himself as he had done tens of thousands of times without a thought—pushed him back as if it were gunfire. Though it was sharp, its remnants were dull and pleasantly hot, as if to announce to him what he had not realized before, that he had a fever, the second stroke of the peculiar clock that had been set to ticking when his body struck the wall.
He had to teach himself how to rise, but first he had to determine the appropriate moves. He knew that he had to roll almost into a facedown position, and that to do this he would have to go left. He understood that, to go left, he had to move his arm out of the way. But that, too, was anything but simple. The pain was bearable when he moved the lower arm, using the elbow as a stiff pivot, but unbearable when he stretched the upper arm into an angle forty-five degrees from his shoulder. Breathing hard, he lifted his right arm over the protruding rib and let it hang limply across his chest. Next came a roll, using the arms as a weight that would help to pull him over. There was no way to do it other than to strain the torso, and for that he paid dearly but found himself on his left side.
With the feeling that his right rib cage was like the ice breaking up on a river, the force of moving water shattering it repeatedly, he pulled his right leg up and rose first to one knee, then the other, and hobbled to the wall. But this was the west wall, and the tanks were to the north, so he stood, using as a rail the very wall that had wounded him. As soon as he was up, he shed the parachute harness, though not without a cost in pain as he crossed first one arm and then another, dropping his shoulders alternately and stepping out of it like a girl shedding her slip. He walked slowly to the north end of the roof. There, looking out from beneath the water tank, he counted twenty-three tanks arrayed, just as he had imagined, along the saddle of the ridge.
When he turned to go back to the spot where he had fallen, he saw a blood trail. Though he had hardly begun his task, the hands of the clock had moved forward.
HE RETURNED TO WHERE he had been lying, not because of any preference for the spot itself but because it was where his parachute hung dangerously over the side. When, by moonlight, he had drifted in, the night shutters had been closed. After the moon had sunk into the sea there were hours of darkness when no one who might have remained in the building, and no one nearby, could have seen the parachute. Even now, with the east light flooding against one side of the house and the parachute roughly the same color as the sunbleached walls, it would for a time be invisible in the shadows.
As soon as it was observed, he could count himself captured or dead. And yet, not having pulled it up, he had dropped to his knees and stretched out. Though it would be hard to rise, and with the increasing light he was ever more likely to be discovered, he lay down and slept. If the pack failed to ride up in the sack formed by the chute, he would have to fabricate some sort of hook, and fish for the pack straps, something that in his condition might take all day. He hadn’t the strength for two pulls. If he brought the parachute up first he had no guarantee that it would bring the pack, but if he went first for the pack the parachute would come with it.
Loss of blood and the heat of the morning allowed him to sleep through the artillery exchanges that came with first light. As he slept, imprecisely directed shells flew overhead as they came in from beyond the horizon. The naval guns were restrained for fear that their projectiles would hit west of the river among the allied positions, so most of the shells struck nothing and to no avail, and many fell into the sea, raising huge plumes of white foam. The Germans would think that no spotters were in place.
He didn’t know that the tanks had held their fire or that the barrage had started at all, until he was jarred awake by the concussions of the bombardment. As soon as he saw that the sun was disconcertingly high he realized that he would be fishing for his radio in full light and full view, and that every second the parachute was draped over the side of the house he was at risk of discovery.
A hook, he thought, from what can I make a hook? He had no wire, nothing to bend, nothing already properly shaped. Then he thought of crossing his bayonet and cleaning rod in an x with long legs and short arms, affixing the parachute cord to one of the short arms, and using that, but the pack weighed more than seventy pounds and he had little confidence that the x would not collapse. A hook was such a simple thing that he had never given it a thought, but now he had to have one, or many men would die.
In the hot sun, high on his hill overlooking the sea, and under a vacantly blue sky, it was as if the cloth shutter of a camera were released to glide across his mind and memory. Bright light came in without obstruction, and then was obscured. Something made him close his eyes. He went from the open rooftop that shook with the explosion of shells, to an uncommonly high-ceilinged room where his tutor had always received him politely before an inadequate fire.
He felt the chill of the room and saw the darkness above. The tutor used to sit close to the fire, next to a small table upon which, without fail, was a book or a manuscript in an obscure language and about a neglected subject. And yet the tutor would give it his full and remarkable attention in the dark autumn afternoon, in the “new” building at Magdalen College, Oxford, while a protected herd of reindeer moved apprehensively through the mist and among the oaks. This room was filled with paintings that in the gloom seemed black.
He remembered as vividly as if time had hooked back on itself how his tutor had said that when facing what seem to be intractable problems the mind quickly comes up with answers that, as if out of modesty, it veils because they are insufficient or incomplete. He was told to look to the failed answers to find in them a route to success. Return to what you have done, and there, very often, you will find what to do hiding among the ruins. He had always thought this technique too Tibetan for an Englishman, and making a hook was a lot more prosaic than, for example, teasing out a subtlety or two of Fra Angelico’s use of light, or understanding at the deepest level how Raphael, propelled by mystic force, used the language of color to embrace the love of God. This was just a hook, after all, a simple hook.
He went back to the idea of the crossed rod and bayonet. In his imagination he crossed them again, and then, just as the tutor had said, he knew what to do. Were he to attach a line to the rifle sling where it curved just past its point of connection to the underbarrel, the six inches of muzzle would be the point of the hook, and the point of attachment would serve as a fulcrum for the countering force of the rest of the rifle’s weight. If the straps of the pack were to settle within two inches of the line, the mechanical advantage would
enable eight pounds—the weight of the rifle centered twenty inches along its length—to lift one hundred sixty pounds. Without any rigidity at all in the attachment of such a hook, it would hold the weight of a man, and affixing parachute cord to the sling, if done with care, would not take more than a minute.
He lifted the rifle over him from the right side to the left and began the ritual of getting up. Moving his arms was sufficient to take his breath away, but he could not turn onto his left side. His shoulders were pinned to the roof as if a wrestler had been sitting on them. He thought to rest and try again.
After the pain had flared and settled, he moved in carefully deliberated stages in which he nonetheless invested every bit of force he could bring to bear. First the right arm, up, bent stiffly at the elbow. He could do that. Then the left, stretched once again at an angle forty-five degrees from the vertical line of his body. Then the lunge to the left that would turn him onto his side. Nothing. In response to the pain, he was paralyzed.
But he was still alive, and in an inimitable position for the observation with which he had been tasked, and he had devised a method for retrieving his essential equipment. He had already discovered tanks on the saddle of the ridge, and, given an hour’s work of observation and reporting, he could direct fire from the ships to destroy or disperse enemy artillery, antiaircraft guns, tanks, and concentrations of infantry. Eventually, the town would fall. This had to be the logic of events, the closing of the ring, but every hour of delay would bring death and broken hearts.
He tried once again so hard that he was thrown back unconscious, awakening soon thereafter, breathing as if he had just run up a hill, his heart racing and weak. Though no physiological reason for this seemed clear, he felt that if he moved, or even if he remained without treatment for a day or two, something that was happening inside him that he could neither see nor understand would kill him. Still, he was not regretful that he hadn’t landed in the ravine, for this high and excellent spot held the promise of victory.
“ALL RIGHT,” he said to himself out loud, in a voice that, had he heard it other than in his present state, he would hardly have recognized, because it croaked like a frog. “I have the hook, I have the position, and I’m unobserved. How am I going to move?” After a few seconds, he knew that he had known the answer before he had voiced the question. “This is how I’m going to move.”
The sun had already passed its zenith. Breathing like a sick man, he swung his right arm toward his thigh, raised his right leg to bring it closer, and let out a little cry as the shattered rib cage compressed. To reach his thigh pocket, it was unavoidable.
He unbuttoned the flap and pulled out the first-aid kit. Unfolding it was difficult, but he managed nonetheless, and pulled out the morphine. Three injectors lay on the whitewashed roof. As much as he wanted it not to be so, they were to be his clock of action and contentment. They would free him from pain and allow him to move, but he had only three of them, and after relying on these he would be in more trouble than he could possibly imagine.
He had been taught that what appears to be the easy way is often the hard way. The ease of drink led to difficult suffering. The softness of luxury brought one to one’s knees. Surrender to what was most beguiling was surrender to what was most cruel. The consistency of the effect was well known, and could turn people of individual and idiosyncratic will into mere mechanisms that had lost their souls.
It was not easy for him to discard the needle cap and plunge the syringe into his thigh, and he did so with disgust. But he did so with urgency, for to retrieve the radio he was now willing to sacrifice his life, and had an injection of strychnine allowed him an hour of unencumbered action he would have injected it.
Even as the needle penetrated into his thigh and he watched the morphine disappear with the steady advance of the piston under his thumb, he felt a sense of immortality surging through him. He had always imagined that morphine was slightly buff-colored, but it was clear. It had just enough of whatever was in it for the light to pick up its viscosity. No matter, now he was immortal, his body a hindrance that he had left behind. Never completed calculations of orbits and angles, and music riding on backlit plumes of light and spray, filled the world.
From beyond subdued ecstasy that seemed to have neither beginning nor end, his lifetime of discipline reached him, and he thought, I don’t want this lovely, gravityless thing that I am entangled in, that’s like kissing a beautiful girl when you’re twenty and so is she, but I don’t want it.
He forced his eyes to roll right and roll left. A blinding sun moved in nauseating arcs as he looked at the wall, the rifle, and the roof. A drop of sweat caught in the golden glare sparkled like the heart of the universe. He could have accepted this freedom and pleasure, and died. He would have died prepared for death, content to go, with a longing to pass completely out of gravity, to lighten entirely. In the vestibule of death where he lay he was lightened only in part, and yet he floated like the sun upon the sea.
Rolling over and standing up, he could hardly feel what was happening inside him—not because there was no pain, but because pain had become a simple thing from which it was easy to feel remote. He stood outside himself, and yet he stood, aware that the greater his exertions the faster he would metabolize the morphine.
Looking over the parapet he saw that his pack had not landed within the folds of the chute but lay next to them almost upright in the brush. A cooling breeze came from below. The day was extraordinarily blue even for Italy, and the evening would be one of those evenings of golden autumn, when all the stonework took on the color of honey. He wanted to be alive at evening.
He was clearheaded enough to calculate that he could reduce his effort by half were he to cut the lines from the harness, which lay at his feet, attach the rifle, and let it fall, pulling the parachute up toward him as the line played through his hands. This he did, and when the rifle went flat in the brush, he pulled in the billowing panels of the parachute and its tangle of cord, and stuffed them between himself and the parapet, for a cushion.
Undoubtedly he could be seen from the valley, but there the enemy would have reason to look only west. The tanks on the ridge were out of sight, and would not see him. Nonetheless, he moved as fast as he could, pulling the rifle until it rose to a forty-five degree angle and pivoted on its butt plate.
With a few minor maneuvers, he moved this heavy marionette until it closed on the pack. Then he let it settle. The muzzle projected into the air and the rifle lay trigger guard up, as if a soldier had taken a break during a march and arrayed his things just so. After a moment of rest, it was easy to lift the rifle into action again, lower it, and in three or four swings hook the pack straps with the muzzle.
Immediately he began to haul the lines. They went smoothly over the parachute silk at the top of the parapet, but still there was friction. The distress of hauling eighty pounds surpassed even the magic of morphine. He could feel the action of his body surrendering to destruction—like beams shearing, roofs collapsing, or cables snapping.
The pack came even with the top of the wall. He pulled it over and fell back to where he had been, still breathing the ethereal breath of morphine, there to lie until the next things he saw were stars in air that had grown cold.
THE DRUG HAD LARGELY WORN OFF, making him queasy and his pain more treacherous. The morphine side of the equation, in which he had floated in awe, was an illusion with a price. As the night breeze came from the west, carrying with it the smell of burning brush in aromatic clouds of smoke that enveloped the city on account of fields that had been set on fire by stray munitions and the phosphorous of battle, he took from within his pack a canteen of water, some cheese, crackers, and a bar of chocolate. After eating a day’s rations all at once, he felt much better. He pulled out the submachine gun, and removed the radio from its wrapping of blankets and a sweater. Once it was switched on, it had only one button to press and release. The monitoring station was in the trees across the river, not e
ven two miles away. He had found his route back to the world, and he prayed that it would still be working.
“Furious to Glorious,” he said. “This is Furious, calling Glorious. Come in Glorious.”
Though the radio itself seemed to be in order, at first there was nothing. Perhaps they had stopped listening. He had been out of contact for a long time, although he was unable to remember exactly how long. He hated not being able to connect.
“Glorious, this is Furious calling. Glorious, come in, please.”
Clicking to receive, he listened to a sea of static, until over the static a voice was carried. “Furious, we haven’t heard from you in how long?” They were testing him.
He didn’t know exactly, so he said, “Since you made me a munition.”
“What’s the first password?”
“Just a minute.” He himself had made up the passwords, but they did not come to him immediately.
“Password,” they said again.
And then he remembered: “I’m the man who broke the bank in Basutoland.”
“Isle of Skye,” was the response, so each knew that the other was real. “Have you had tea?”
“Yes. And I can tell you next time about the birthday parties of everyone in the company, in every platoon.” This meant that he was so situated that he could call in strikes against targets in any cell on the map, each one of which was marked by a date, from nineteen hundred to the present, picked at random to fill the two-thousand-cell grid.
“When?”
“When the trucks come with the new barrels.” This meant at next light.
“Very good, Furious. Stay well. Glorious out.”
“Furious out.”
Alone, as soon as the static disappeared from the earpiece, he felt a surge of contentment. He moved his watch so close to his face that it seemed like a wall. It was two in the morning: he had four hours to go before he could acquire a target. He would make a list, call it in, and fine-tune each salvo. The four night hours would be morphineless, as he would need the morphine for getting up and to stay standing.