The Pacific and Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  HE HAD THOUGHT that time would pass very slowly in the confines of the shed, but it had raced, and when he looked at the tritium-laced hands of his watch he saw that he had overstayed. He unlatched the door, which the wind then threw open. Though they were yet to be stripped of their branches, the palm trees were getting ragged. He did not even have to look, but could sense that everyone else was gone. It was not quite like being alone on the sea, but he felt a sense of freedom. No man would be watching him, no one to confine, judge, or proscribe except nature itself. You could not be lonely when you were completely alone, but only when you were close enough to others to fail them or to have been failed by them.

  As if eager to run into the heart of the storm, his boat was bobbing urgently near the top of the pilings to which it was moored. It had not been constructed to sit at a dock or cruise idly in middling seas. It had been made for the lower fifties and the highest sea state, and when he stepped aboard from the dock covered by two feet of water, he imagined that the boat knew it.

  In a quick and final release, he cut away from the moorings. Never again would he tie up. Never again would he maneuver into a slip. There would be no alteration of action and rest, but only action building without cease until it became eternal stillness.

  The boat moved from its slip into the channel, cutting to windward, picking up speed. With just a yard of mainsail he was making fifteen knots and leaving foam. This running of the slot was complicated, for if he had blown to the lee of the channel he could never get back, and would die in the muddy bureaucracy of the mangrove roots.

  But all was going well and fast. The keel, a great underwater sail and balance for the power of the wind, held him on course like a straightedge. The difficult part was yet to come, the race to the sea. It was a short stretch, but if the wind blew straight down this untackable slot he would never get out to open water. He had counted on the fact that the storm had a north by northeast bias and the channel veered slightly northwest. He would know at the turn, where the wind came freely off the ocean, undisturbed by the now rapidly disappearing island.

  He wished that at the turn, eighty-five degrees to port in two hundred feet, he could lift the keel and skate into position, but the keels of ocean racers are not centerboards and do not lift in shallow water, and the boats they steady were never intended to skid.

  When the time came he spun the wheel and tightened the mainsheet. The stern swung around in a graceful movement and the boat reoriented even before it reached center channel. All it had to do was break through the waves sweeping down the slot.

  At the turn, these waves had been five feet from trough to crest, and at the end of what once had been the jetty, fifteen. Even before he left the last qualified embrace of land he was in the storm and the boat was flying across the crests and thudding against the troughs. Before he sailed beyond what had been the beach, waves washed over the deck and tried to take him with them, but his safety lines held.

  Then he cleared the land and sailed into the violence of the storm, his boat battered near to death not even two miles from his house. This would not do: his desire was to reach the heart of the storm, where he would match its rage with equanimity. At the heart of the storm, he believed, he would find love. Why he thought this he did not exactly know, but he thought that if in difficulty the heart rose, then what could be more promising than the heart of a storm? He swung the prow west-northwest and ran close in, lifting the mainsail another few feet. In wind that screamed in the halyards he could have made good headway just sailing with the mast, but he wanted strain, and he flew forward at more than thirty knots. No one alive would have been strong enough to hold a tiller in these moments, and for him, because he was old, holding the wheel was almost unbearable, but he held it, locking it when he could, and unlocking it to trim when he had to, hoping that it would not be pulled from his hands and spun so that the spokes blurred and he would have to run with the wind until the boat detonated against a beach made invisible by colossal surf.

  Although he had never seen a sea like this, he had been schooled in long-lasting storms that had not been so different, and he managed to hold and persevere. As he moved forward and the hours passed in cold and exciting agony, he found regions of waves so high that sliding down them was like falling from a cliff. As it got darker, the tritium hands glowed more brightly, he breathed hard, and the noise of wind and water was so great that it hurt.

  And when he had been out for so long that it was night and great hills of foam appeared in a malevolent glow and almost broke over him without warning, he felt very tired and ready to sleep, and that, at last, he was closing upon the heart of the storm, a terrible darkness tinged with light.

  Charlotte of the Utrechtseweg

  DOWN BY ST. ELIZABETH’s, up from the river and toward the museum, just beyond where the Utrechtseweg parts from the Onderlangs, he died with the vision of his daughter Charlotte in his eyes. He had been lying in the street after staying impossibly long on his knees, unreachable by his men except those who, having come to get him against his orders, lay dead nearby. Descending silently toward the fields west of Arnhem in perfectly balanced September light, he had known it might end this way. He had known well enough at least so that before the glider came to rest upon the golden stubble of recently cut hay, he felt an upwelling of affectionate memory, of love, and of deep gratitude for all he had been allowed.

  And that had been much, even if only for a short time. Charlotte had just turned eighteen and was now posted to an antiaircraft gun in Chelsea. To be stationed in Chelsea in any capacity was a prize, but it was hardly comforting to think of his daughter—the vision of whom as a child in her red dress he could not banish from his mind—in the semidarkness of London lit by its own burning, firing her gun against resurgent fleets of German bombers, air-breathing ramjets, and rockets. There was no comfort. That was the trick at the end, to understand finally that every comfort was in vain, and then to understand that comfort was unneeded, and thus somehow to rise into death reassured.

  The glider pilot had been masterful when, cut away from the tow, he had come into his own. Aircraft crowded the sky like swallows, and after the gliders landed they sat upon the fields like the tank traps that look like children’s jacks, obstructions in the paths of those that followed. But the pilot of his glider, in a burst of brilliance and concentration, banked, circled, and swooped as all inside went silent and breathless, and found the one clear alley in a field littered with broken fuselages and shattered wings.

  From the moment they landed they were raked with the fire of German heavy machine guns embedded efficiently in the woods, chattering as if to one another as they picked out the abundant targets. This ignited the fields and the gliders that lay pierced and broken upon them. A wounded man with smoke coming from phosphorus burning in his chest begged to be shot. They would not, or could not, and when the line of flame neared him, he shot himself.

  The idea that Charlotte would be left alone was intolerable, but in the minutes remaining of his life he had accepted it. He had parted from her in a restaurant at Victoria Station. A beautiful blonde girl, she was miraculously awkward and nearsighted. “You don’t aim the gun, do you, Charlotte?” he had asked, and she had replied, “Oh, no, I’m the loader.”

  He had come up from Aldershot for lunch, the last time he would see her except in indelible memory. Both knew that it would take other people at least a split second, and perhaps more, to realize that the major, of full maturity, was not inappropriately associating with a young private. Because of that, they were slightly reticent, as they had learned to be when Charlotte had grown tall and they went together in public, Charlotte’s mother having died when she was seven.

  They looked very much alike, and to anyone with half a mind it was clear from facial structure and coloring, and the particular way that both were burnished by August sun, that they were father and daughter. “How are you coming along?” he asked, intensely interested in her answer, which, because
she did not ever think in terms of how she was coming along, was lacking in specifics.

  Because he wanted to order the best thing on the menu, he asked for haricot beef, which was actually corned beef, and then for the chocolate cake—“1 good oz. Bournville Cocoa”—with mock whipped cream. Father and daughter seemed the picture of strength. In ordinary times he would be looking forward to a slow unfurling of the years, with London their background. He was a barrister, and would have been content to move from case to case as if on rocks that make a path across a stream, with a remote but watchful eye out for Charlotte—and presents for the baby, a drink in town with his son-in-law, his shotguns going eventually to the grandchildren if they were boys. Death slowly brought out was easier because of all that led up to it and filled in after it, which is why, when he fell to his knees on the Utrechtseweg after the first bullets cut into his abdomen, he stayed up.

  Even from behind the far revetments where the enemy was firing it was clear that this figure, sunk to its knees, rifle splayed beyond reach, was finished. He had so much about him of hesitation that it could be read at a mile. He did not want to go down, not because he didn’t know that he was dying, but because to collapse so quickly did not seem right. Something was happening. Something had to happen. And it required that, for a while, even if they shot him because for them it seemed inappropriate that he would not collapse, he simply could not go down.

  Life was, after all, timing. “Without doubt, all my patients will die,” the surgeon had told him when reporting to the battalion, “the question is when.” When to leave a dinner party, when to cast a fly, when to catch the eye of a woman and when to disengage. You would not stay locked, eye to eye, forever, so the disengage was just as important as the engage, and would in the end determine the beauty of the moment. The Germans firing at him to make him as neat as the others they had put down might not understand, but he had to stay up because it was like music. The song should not end too abruptly. He wasn’t ready for the last notes, which would come as he lay on the pavement, soon enough, and to do justice to the music he had to stay on his knees. How strange for a man on his knees to be an emblem of defiance.

  It would have been defiance if, swaying slightly, he had held his position for the sake of the enemy, but it was hardly the enemy for whose sake he held. Something was happening, time was being knit up, sense was being made, chapters closed, chapters opened, visions of Charlotte rising.

  In June he had proposed to his division commander, albeit informally at tennis, that his paratroops, if not all others, be equipped with flotation bladders. “With what?” the general had responded, in a way that meant that the proposal had been spoken in vain. Alliances are difficult to run, officers to influence. Millions die because bureaucracies are naturally immobile. Because bureaucracies are naturally immobile, families perish, lines end, names vanish, hopes expire.

  “Flotation bladders for paratroops?”

  “Yes, sir. West to east, from Normandy to Berlin, we’ll have to cross countless rivers, and we would be much better off if each man could swim with his weapons and ammunition. Where there are neither boats nor bridges, we would be able to surprise the enemy with unexpected crossings, and we could avoid being trapped against water obstacles.”

  The general took some more scotch. “How much would these ‘flotation bladders’ weigh?”

  “Less than a pound. Collapsed, they would be about the size of several pairs of socks.”

  “I’m sorry. That small addition to each kit would require subtraction from the division of thousands of pounds of ammunition, food, or medical supplies, for an advantage that is hypothetical at best. Can’t do it.” Then they volleyed in the hot sun.

  South of the Utrechtseweg and the Onderlangs was a bridgeless curve of the Rhine that made one of the natural walls of what quickly became known as “the sack.” The other natural wall was the hill to the north, and it and the river narrowed the sack to the east. The Germans had laid their defenses on all sides but the western entrance: south across the river, in a brick works; north on the hillside; and east at the neck. Right in the center of these fields of fire ran the Utrechtseweg, where he would die.

  But had the battalion been able to float across the Rhine, to the west of the sack, they could have outflanked the Germans at the brick works and come from behind at the neck. They would not have had to die in such great number. Nor would they have been stalled, or driven back. Because there were many piers, no one would have had to swim more than six hundred feet, and even without the piers the river was nowhere more than a thousand feet wide. One of the placid visions he had as he rested upon his knees on the pavement of the Utrechtseweg, a curiosity of not falling, was of floating. It was as if it had happened and he were remembering it; that is, silently, delicately, floating across the Rhine, sometimes twirling, fully laden, pushed west by the flow, at the head of three-quarters of his battalion now that the colonel had been killed.

  He knew from the way the battle had unfolded that had they been able to float they would not have been detected; that, emerging on the south bank, they would have been able to rout the Germans; and that they would have lived. He would have lived. Charlotte would not have been left alone in a world still overwhelmed by war, nor in war’s difficult aftermath. He knew it, and had known it even at the tennis court at Aldershot, and as he stood on his knees upon the Utrechtseweg it broke his heart that he had not been able to make a better argument at tennis, that he had not pressed, that he had not brought it up again, that he had not been more socially prominent, or of a higher rank. For thus, in all these ways, he had failed Charlotte.

  But, then, the men around him who would die that day had failed their children, too. For the sake of one’s child, one was supposed to be able to accomplish superhuman feats. That was the universal story arisen from the universal will, but it was not so any more than that animals can save their offspring or themselves from slaughter, or prisoners always escape, or parents take every precaution, or soldiers live through every battle.

  A momentary cessation of fire surrounded the major with quiet as he rested on his knees on the Utrechtseweg. Three men who had ignored his signs not to come for him lay dead just beyond his reach, or he would have touched them gently. Scores of others—his captains, his lieutenants, and the ranks—watched from cover. Some cried from pity and frustration. Some were angry at the enemy for using their major as bait. And almost to a man, except for those new to the battalion, they remembered a parade the summer before the summer that had just passed, when Charlotte, who still lived with her father, had decided to cut quickly across the parade ground because, although several battalions were drawn up and waiting, the general had yet to arrive and was nowhere in sight.

  Among many of the hundreds of men in his battalion, who saw her most often, and the thousands in other formations, who glimpsed her on occasion, she was regarded with a protective tenderness that could transcend even the most rapacious and brutal natures. Most of these men were very close to her age: they saw her as a sister. Others, who were older but not yet old enough to have children of their own, or at least not children of her age, thought of her nonetheless as a daughter.

  She was the daughter of this regiment, the child of the battalion, and each man was respectful and protective. And when Charlotte—nearsighted, physically ungraceful, and nervous—dashed across the parade ground rather than spend fifteen minutes skirting it with a heavy load of books in her arms, she tripped and fell forward. All the books, their pages opening like wings, flew from her like released doves, and as they and the contents of her purse landed in a jumble spread out hopelessly before her, she, too, fell to her knees in shock, and her round, thick spectacles, with gold rims the color of her hair, were knocked from her face.

  Her father, who had often seen her fall, and suffered the pain of a father who sees his child fall many times more than she should, instantly ran to her. The faster he could reach her and get her on her feet, the less her embarras
sment, the quicker it would be over, perhaps the fewer twitters in the vast assemblage of men who, now perfectly turned out, seemed in contrast to be perfectly graceful. But he was unable to reach her, for a dozen men had fallen out of line and blocked his way. Surrounding the fallen Charlotte, they lifted her up, gathered her books, and offered encouraging words.

  Though her father could not see, she accepted these attentions with the preternaturally endearing quality that had drawn them in the first place, and, flustered and embarrassed, went on her way. But within seconds, she fell again. Every heart went out to her, and this time the escort that came to her aid walked with her—as if the prime minister had been walking in the East End after a bombing raid—and saw her across the parade ground and to the street, while the formations looked on. As Charlotte disappeared among the trees flanking the road, the parade was perfectly silent, ordered, and content.

  These were the men who witnessed her father’s refusal to drop further than his knees on the Utrechtseweg. For him—and for Charlotte—three had already given their lives in trying to fetch him back. And after his unequivocal order, if only by sign, that no more were to try, they were willing and they wanted to, but they were good soldiers and, understanding him exactly, they watched, knowing that it could not be long.