The Pacific and Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  The force of balance that had kept him on his knees had left him: a strong breeze could have blown him down, and he stayed up merely by the grace of circumstance. He swayed slightly, with the alarming disconnectedness of a tree that has been cut all the way through and moves at first minutely in one direction and then minutely in another, as if realizing that it is about to fall but, never having fallen, does not know how.

  He looked up, throwing his head back to take in the sky for the last time. Clouds at a high and windy altitude passed by as if to avoid the war on the ground. Though the sky was blue, bits of paper and ash floated in the air like snow. It seemed natural that the town was burning. For years, as London had burned at close and common intervals, raining ash was something quite ordinary.

  The honor of toppling him was taken by a German soldier who, objecting perhaps to the incongruous, plinthlike shape rising from the flatness of the Utrechtseweg, fired a bullet into his back. As it passed through his left shoulder, the impact spun him around and sent him to the pavement.

  His men made sharp gestures and showed on their faces the painful expressions that acknowledged his death. But they had to attend to their own survival and to the fight. His death would be the turning point. They would go no farther, and the Utrechtseweg would be abandoned.

  But he was not dead. He was lying flat and facedown on the pavement, looking at his right hand, which was covered with dried blood from having been pressed to his abdomen after he had first been shot, and had now curled around something invisible, as if from the muscle tone that still remained, that, ordinarily, when he slept, curled his fingers around something nonexistent.

  Now he felt no pain, having passed the apprehension of pain some minutes before while still on his knees. Though the life was draining from him, he felt comfortable, giddy, and grateful. He thought of the civilians on the Utrechtseweg to the west of Arnhem, who had met the masses of nervous British soldiers as if the battle were already over, offering flowers and pitchers of milk. The children had had patches of orange cloth pinned to their clothing. People danced. The British had been happy but uneasy. They had begged the civilians to go back to shelter, but had been unable to turn down their hospitality or disapprove of their joy. After the German snipers had opened fire, as was inevitable, the Dutch had scattered, and three paratroopers had died.

  How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past woundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.

  When Charlotte was not yet two, she had mounted a step to reach the top of a small Christmas tree in front of the fireplace. In little velvet pumps, white tights, and a red dress, she had reached out with her right hand to touch a ribbon at the crown of the tree. Her left arm hung straight down for balance, hand pressed against her thigh. Very proud of how high she was, she had turned to her father and mother, fear gone, in triumph and joy. Her smile was evident as much in her eyes as in the smile itself. How he loved her. He had always loved her. He would always love her. She was there with him on the Utrechtseweg, and yet she was protected and safe. He closed his right hand with great tenderness, for this was now all he could move, his last embrace of the little girl in the red dress, and it was as if he really were embracing her, as if she were there.

  Down by St. Elizabeth’s, up from the river and toward the museum, and just beyond where the Utrechtseweg parts from the Onderlangs, he died with the vision of his daughter Charlotte in his eyes.

  Last Tea with the Armorers

  IT SEEMED TO THE INSTRUCTRESS that the tall, red-haired Australian in her class would never, could never, properly pronounce a single word of Hebrew, and so she began with unusual care for the sound of things. “Let’s start,” she said, “with the place where we find ourselves. The first word is not pronounced, as it is spelled, like the English word bat, but, rather, like the name of the currency of Thailand. Who can tell me what that is?”

  Although the Canadians, Americans, South Africans, and British in the class did not know, the Australian did, and he pronounced it perfectly—perhaps not perfectly in Thai, but perfectly in Hebrew: “Baht,” he said, shyly.

  “Very good,” said the instructress, beginning to relax. “Baht, with a deep a and a partially sibilant t, slightly elided to the next word. And the next word is Gallim, the l-l-i-m of which are pronounced as are the l-e-a-m in the English word gleam, as in the gleam of the waves at Bat Gallim.”

  She made the class say, first individually and then in unison, “the gleam of the waves at Bat Gallim, the gleam of the waves at Bat Gallim … the gleam of the waves at Bat Gallim.”

  “What does Bat Gallim mean?” asked a Canadian girl.

  “Waves,” said the Australian, pronouncing the word almost like wives.

  “Wives?” the Canadian girl asked.

  “That’s right,” the Australian answered, “daughter of the waves,” but, as he pronounced it, “daughter of the wives.”

  “Waves,” the teacher said, correcting the Australian not in Hebrew, which he had pronounced perfectly, but in his own language. “And, yes, I suppose you could say, most poetically, that it means daughter of the waves.”

  Most poetically, it did. The waves never ceased to unravel upon the beaches and beneath the seawalls of Bat Gallim, having been unfurled across the Mediterranean along its entire length from Gibraltar to the cliffs of the Levant. The strong west wind that brought them from the Atlantic left them as they broke, to vault the coastal mountains and drive for the deserts of Iraq. Once abandoned, the waves retreated in silence and shock, rocking as if in puzzlement, sparkling, foaming, and then subsiding into the deep green waters over which new waves glided for shore.

  At Bat Gallim, anything new soon was made old by the sea. Salt air was more brutal to concrete than were mortar rounds or naval cannon. Other than sea and sky, the only things colorfast, fresh, and young were flowers and palms. These were especially exuberant upon the mall of Avenue Bat Gallim in its two short blocks from Rehov Ha-Aliya to the sea. The sun only made them brighter and the salt wind only made them sway, and at night under the stars they lost their special affinity for brightness and color, to become merely mysterious and sweet.

  Villas with terra-cotta roofs held the promontory of Bat Gallim like a beachhead. They had been built in the main by German Jews who, unable to leave Europe behind, settled a few strides from where they had stepped off the boat, on the sea side of the railroad tracks, separated from the city of Haifa, from the country itself, from the land that was the gate to the East.

  ANNALISE UNDERSTOOD that Bat Gallim was forgotten and compact, a world unto itself, even with an ocean. It had been her home since 1947, when, at the age of nine, a starved child whose eyes sat in her face like foxes’ eyes, like moons or marbles, she had walked there from the port, holding her father’s hand.

  They had been so used to internment and waiting that they assumed their stay next to the sea would be short, and that they would then be trucked inland to a place in the Jordan Valley or the Galilee, or perhaps to Jerusalem itself. It did not seem likely that one could live out a whole life in the vestibule. But it was to the vestibule that they were assigned and in the vestibule where they were left.

  An apartment had opened up a few days before their arrival. Two rooms on the top floor of an old villa on Rehov Avdimi, with a small terrace and a view of the sea, it had been furnished with British officers’ camp chairs and tables left behind in the phased withdrawal, and in the kitchen the Jewish Agency had left a case of grapefruit for the father and daughter who had lived in a world where a human life was worth less than an orange.

  “How long will we remain?” Annalise’s father had asked the man from the Jewish
Agency, who was about to give them the keys.

  This man, who had watched his two charges look upon the grapefruit as if it were a gift of God, lifted his shoulders and let them fall. He was darkly sunburned and dressed in khakis, and from the wall behind him came the reflected sound of the surf. “Until you want to go someplace else,” he said, and then, touching Annalise’s cheek, “until she marries a kibbutznik with blue shorts and a hoe welded to his shoulder.”

  “I don’t understand,” Annalise’s father had said. “Whose apartment is it?”

  “Until recently it belonged to a woman who went to Degania Aleph to live with her children. Now it’s yours. In a week or two you’ll get the papers.”

  “But we haven’t paid for it.”

  The Jewish Agency man looked at the father and daughter and his eyes dropped to their arms. The father was in long sleeves, but a Shield of David and a number were plainly visible on the child’s arm. Though, as she grew, the lines of the tattoos would soften and break, they were now as solid and intense as if they had been done the day before.

  “Haven’t you?” he asked.

  PERHAPS it would have been better to go inland, to leave behind the sound of the waves, where Annalise thought she could hear her mother’s voice, and exchange their constant murmur for the mystery of a tall grove of palms in the silence of the desert floor, or for fields of wheat, or terraced hillsides of ancient olive trees. At least they would not have had a painful second grief in a room of unceasing echoes, where, suddenly, one part of the story was over, and where with their abrupt lack of movement came the death of the illusion that when finally they would settle they would be as they were when last they were settled: a father, his wife, and two children—a little girl and a baby boy. The infant had gone in his mother’s arms while the girl had clung fearfully to her father, overlooked. For almost a year she had been hidden behind planks in a coal bin at the factory, fed what could be carried in a clenched fist.

  Had they gone inland or had they even just crossed the railroad tracks and risen into the loveliness of the Hadar, everything would have been different. Bat Gallim, however, was like a pool in a river where water is trapped as if by nothing more than the exclusionary speed of the current in the main channel. As the wall of water flows by, the water in the pool circles in hypnotic distraction.

  In 1972, a quarter of a century after their arrival, when Annalise was thirty-four and her father in his seventies, they still lived in the same small set of rooms, now impossible to leave because of its perfect familiarity.

  Annalise’s father was the night watchman in the language academy, where the tall red-haired Australian had surprised everyone, and not least himself, with an astonishing gift for languages. He had entered the program at the beginning of August, and by the middle of September could speak Hebrew with passable fluency in any accent he chose—the sonorous dialect of the radio announcer, the flat, oscillating whine of Russian, the unbearable tension of Arabic, the archival self-caress of French—even Irish, Swedish, or Turkish.

  “You should see the Australian boy,” Annalise’s father said to her as they were eating dinner on their small terrace looking over the empty beach and the evening’s undeflected waves. In the heat of September, Annalise had put out tomatoes, cucumbers, cheese, herring, pita, and a pitcher of seltzer with ice, lemons, and strawberries. “We watch the news now. He can understand the news in Hebrew, and have a discussion afterward. Six weeks ago he didn’t know an aleph from an ayin.”

  Annalise nodded, as if to say it was impressive, while at the same time saying as little as possible. She looked down at her plate, still a beautiful Mediterranean still life, and resolved not to add to it even one more tomato. She was extraordinarily disciplined, and permanently heavyset. Though she would not allow herself to gain weight and was lean from swimming laps every day, she was heavyset and big-boned—two very unbecoming phrases for the unbecoming—and that was the way it was. Although no picture of her mother existed, her father had described the mother to his daughter so painstakingly and so often that the daughter had an image to keep clearly and loyally until death, after which there would not be in the world even a memory by description—much less a body, a portrait, or even a notion of a resting place—of this woman whom she had loved above all else, whom she herself remembered imprecisely only because her overwhelming love had blurred the details except as they were redrawn for her by her father.

  Annalise’s mother had been as graceful as a dancer. Anything she wore would drape over her with the beauty of form one might see in a painting—cloth falling as relaxedly as water—and her flesh would never press the fabric uncomfortably, as with Annalise, making it a gauge of her discontent.

  And although Annalise lay in bed perfectly disciplined and hungry, and although she swam a kilometer every afternoon, and in the morning spent three-quarters of an hour at calisthenics (a habit since her first army service), she had nevertheless to contend with what she termed “that damnable and indelible pear shape.” She was by no means homely. She was not in any way homely. She was, in fact, almost pretty.

  “And then we sit on the porch and talk, mostly in Hebrew,” her father said, “but sometimes in English. Usually at this point my English is better than their Hebrew, but his Hebrew is now better than my own. And he doesn’t work that hard. He’s in the sea half the day. He goes far into the sea. Australians and Americans always swim past the buoy, out to where the ships are. I see them from the terrace while you’re at work. From a distance they look like seals, or seabirds. They’re not afraid of the sea, as are Europeans.” He reached for more bread. It was through him that she had inherited the damnable pear shape. Even if, as a man, he did not have to be pear-shaped himself, his mother, Annalise’s grandmother, had been wondrously pear-shaped.

  “He’s thirty-six years old, has a degree in chemical engineering, and has never been married.” And then, as if to apologize on behalf of the Australian, her father said, “In Australia there aren’t many jobs in chemical engineering, which is why he came here.”

  “You mean he was unemployed,” Annalise said.

  “He had a job, but in a different field.”

  “What was he, a kangaroo trainer?”

  “He was in aeronautics.”

  “What does that mean, ‘He was in aeronautics’?”

  “He worked at the airport.”

  “Doing what?”

  “He was in baggage systems. Chemical engineering is concerned with the flow of materials in timed processes and streams, just like moving baggage around a terminal. He redesigned the baggage-handling system at the airport in Sydney. He says what they had was truly awful and stupid.”

  “I see. Did they put his plan into practice?”

  “They refused. It’s what pushed him finally to emigrate. You know, people usually move to Australia, not from it.”

  “And in the years between his chemical-engineering degree and his departure, what did he do?”

  “He was a baggage handler. What’s wrong with that? I’m a night watchman.”

  “You were broken,” Annalise said. “You have every right, and God’s leave, to do or not to do as you please. How can ambition mean anything for you, or for me? But for him! It’s not that it’s important. It’s that the lack of it is more important—as a sign. I don’t want to marry a failed baggage handler, failed chemical engineer, who is a refugee from a rich, peaceful, democratic country. They’re all—over there—there’s something wrong with them. We came here because we had to. They’re sick with discontent.”

  “Marry? Who said marry? Why do young people always jump to conclusions?”

  “You do want me to marry, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do, and it’s not too late.”

  “But, still,” Annalise said, “it’s almost a matter of minutes.”

  • • •

  SOMETIMES THE TRAINS that ran on the track separating Bat Gallim from the rest of Haifa were lines of passenger cars that r
attled lightly as they went by, generating a Swiss sound that spoke of precision and containment. And sometimes military trains thundered along under the weight of a hundred tanks chained down to a mile of flatcars. The mass of armor moving resolutely through the night—to confound Russian satellites, convoys traveled mainly in darkness—shook the ground of Bat Gallim, rattled windows, crockery, and doors, echoed in the lungs, and left behind the kind of deafening silence that even the birds were reluctant to break, although eventually they always did.

  Of all the people in Bat Gallim, the Australian was the most distracted by the trains, because his room at the language academy was the habitation closest to the track bed. Beyond the window was a six-foot strip of ground over which a set of clotheslines was suspended from two pipe frames. Almost touching them was a chain-link fence, and on the other side of this the crushed rock that lay beneath the railroad ties pressed like a pile of coins spilling from a sack. The western rail of the Haifa–Tel Aviv line was no more than ten feet from the Australian’s head as he sat at his desk. When armor trains went by, with sentries perched unhappily on the backs of halftracks and in the hatches of tanks, everything in the room—and that was precious little—vibrated and tried to escape, like the contents of a household coming alive in terror during an earthquake.

  He had to hold his glasses on his face, which always made him smile, and to catch his pen before it rolled to the edge of the desk and flipped into the void like a naval commando deploying at sea from a speeding rubber boat. He wore glasses except when he was in the surf, when the pleasure of the sun and the waves was accompanied by a nearsightedness that abstracted color and light.

  And as if the ten-foot separation of his senses from the massive wheels of many trains was not enough, he shared the room with a psychotic Soviet Georgian Jew who could not survive on air untainted by tobacco smoke. This thin, apelike, crazy creature with eyes that sparkled like lights, and three or four knives hidden upon his person at all times, was never not smoking. Sleep for him was a torture, a nightmare, and a poison, because as he slept he had to breathe real air.