by Mark Helprin
It would all end on the ninth of October, when even the army would admit that she was too old.
ANNALISE’S FATHER ROSE from the dinner table and stepped to the rail of the terrace. “Look,” he said, “the season is over, and he’s out in the distance, like a seal. Perhaps it is a seal.” He went to get his binoculars, leaving Annalise, seemingly annoyed, to eat alone.
The light, which changes more by the sea than anywhere else, had moved into the autumnal tranquillity of October. Even in summer the north light that spreads out upon the sea off Haifa is sober and deep, a courtly lover of color that quietly brings out its richest hues. But in the fall, the light is greatest as it struggles with shadow, of which there is suddenly so much that the beaches empty even though the water is warm.
Only the old women whom everyone called the whales would stay down at the beach, in their usual position, sitting at the water’s edge so that the waves ran up their legs and around their balloonlike buttocks, burying them slowly in the sand like the foundations of a pier. For some reason, they wore rubber bathing caps for this ritual, though not a drop of foam ever touched their hair.
“It’s him,” Annalise’s father said, focusing. “Come see.”
“I saw,” Annalise said.
“Look close up,” her father insisted, as people do when they have binoculars (and then they won’t give them to you).
She sighed in irritation, but, to humor him and because it certainly seemed safe to glance at someone almost a mile away, out at sea, beyond reach, she took the binoculars.
Lifting them to her eyes, she began to turn the focus wheel even before the eyepieces made contact with her face: she knew how different her father’s vision was from her own.
At first she saw only a blur of empty sea, crystalline in the barrels of the binoculars, the motion of the waves nauseating in and out of focus. Then, as she turned the wheel, she began to see the lines we tend to forget are in water, the shapes, the patches, and the texture.
The sky came level at the horizon and she now had her bearings, sweeping like the ray from the Stella Maris Light, slewing like the guns of one of her armorers. She caught him, she inadvertently swept past, returned, and locked him in.
“He doesn’t look like a monkey,” Annalise said. “He doesn’t look like a monkey at all.”
“That’s what I told him.”
Annalise hesitated for a moment, a moment that because of its brevity she knew would be entirely private. The Australian was sitting astride an air mattress, riding the swells. His body was hard and muscular. Even from a great distance she could see the changing definition of his shoulders, arms, and abdomen as he moved to stay balanced. He kept his back straight and his head erect as he and his air mattress swayed from the peaks to the troughs of the waves, and the wind sometimes blew spray at his face.
Annalise put down the binoculars, suddenly overcome with the same kind of slow pleasure she had sensed so strongly in her beautiful friend, Shoshanna.
“He’s out there every day,” her father said. “I’ll find it interesting to see if he makes it to December.”
ON SATURDAY, on her leave, Annalise’s father made his own dinner, and at five o’clock she stood alone on the beach, in shadow, in a brisk wind. Refusing to shiver in the breeze, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her robe on the sand, and straightened as she entered the water.
Though she had expected the sea to be cold, it was far warmer than the air, and even the spray that tangled in her hair as she swam still held the warmth of six months of Middle Eastern sun. Soon she found herself in the belt of water between the chaos of the breaking waves and the wide, deepening sea. This narrow layer of green water was warmer and not as lonely as the blue. She knew that she would cross it quickly and that after she did she would no longer be able to hear the noises from shore. The wind would drown out the sound of the surf and of crows cawing rhythmically in palms on the quay.
In fear of the deep, of ships, of drowning, and of the wind that could silently sweep her away, she swam stiffly, with the tension of a trespasser. But as soon as she could no longer hear the surf and the crows, she relaxed, abandoning herself entirely to the sea. Her exertion, her arms reaching ahead in the water, and the huge rolling of glassy and gleaming waves brought her to a different world.
Though far from shore, the water seemed warmer and more buoyant. With Haifa compacted and Bat Gallim miniaturized, the sea was the master of the world. In less than half an hour she had come so close to the Australian that she could make out his face. She stopped swimming and let her feet sink as she surveyed the space before her.
He was very interested in the prospect of someone swimming to his station, particularly a woman, perhaps because no one had ever been out there with him except for a few Americans, and they had always accompanied him from the start.
He paddled toward her, and the waves did the rest, pushing them together with inexplicable rapidity. She could see his face quite clearly. He looked like a yeshiva boy, or maybe an unusual Englishman, an eccentric, an adolescent.
On the other hand, he looked strong and decisive, even if his history seemed to indicate otherwise. Something in his eyes and in the hard strength of his body said that he would come through like a man, that if he were a husband he would be faithful, that if he were a father he would be true.
When they were close enough, he asked, “Did you mean to swim out here?”
“Of course I did,” she answered, smiling as she had never smiled in her life, a soft, alluring smile that shut out the past and had nothing in it but the possibilities of the future. Turning as red as a burn victim, he was for a while unable to speak.
“May I come onto the raft?” she asked.
“Come,” he said, extending his arm. When she took it he held fast, giving her something solid and unmoving to hold as she pulled herself up.
“I suppose it’s like being stuck in an elevator,” she said, “but I won’t be long.”
“Stay as long as you’d like,” he told her. “I was just about to go in, though it won’t be dark for a while, and even if it were dark the lights on Mount Carmel can be seen for fifty miles at sea. We could always swim for the lights.”
“What about the currents?” she asked, mindful of their distance from shore.
“Oh, the currents,” he answered. “If they wanted, they could take us all the way to Al-Arish.”
In, strangely enough, the most sexually provocative words she had ever uttered, and yet modestly, she said, “That would be very uncomfortable, wouldn’t it?”
He didn’t answer. Her smooth and solid limbs were still half in the water—as the raft bobbed on the swells, the sea would run up her thighs, and down, and when it sank deep into the crest of an oncoming wave the water went all the way up to the base of her neck, and then washed away, perfectly outlining her breasts in the wet tank top. Taking his eyes from her body, he surveyed her face. She was not the kind of woman for whom men would turn as they walked on the street, but in her expression were great beauty and grace. In her expression, in her imperfect, somewhat too heavy features, he could see experience, and suffering, and strength, and love.
A face like hers, if held differently, if set off by different eyes, if shaped by bitterness or greed, would not be beautiful. But the way she smiled was all beauty, suddenly, as if he were the first to see. Never had she been so buoyant or so lovely. Perhaps it was the sea. God knows what she took from the sea.
THE NEXT DAY, late in the afternoon when the light was heaviest with color, the Australian sat in a deserted classroom on the second floor of an academic building at the language academy. Looking toward the sea, the slopes of Mount Carmel to his left, he saw alley upon alley of palms and other trees of waxen leaves, filtering the beginnings of the sunset and slightly davening in the wind. Everything was green and rich and red.
In front of him lay a Hebrew notebook, in which he now had little interest and upon which he could not concentrate. Normally, he came i
n from the sea, redid his exercises and lessons so that he would know them with absolute certainty, and then pushed ahead. Not for an hour, but for four or five, he would read the newspapers in his new language, poetry, and even a textbook of chemical engineering, his dictionary well exercised, his notebook filling steadily.
He knew that within a year his fluency could be more than just a tour de force, that industries were developing with great momentum, that his skill might take him far. The place felt open. It was growing. People embarked upon new things, taking immense risks. Agricultural settlements lured in doctoral engineers and in six months were manufacturing transistors and medical instruments. Who knew what might happen?
But this was not why he was unable to concentrate. He was distracted, he thought, because, in the courtyard below, several classes were singing. For people who had just begun to learn the language, they sang with surprising beauty. Perhaps it was the acoustics, or the mix of voices of many different languages. Perhaps it was the presence of the sea, the metronome of the waves, the counterpoint of the surf. Perhaps it was the lightness they felt, having floated free from where they had been born, with few connections now except to things like the beauty of song.
He could not concentrate. He closed his books and removed his glasses. The music swelled below, a lovely, hopeful ballad, “Ha Yom Yavoe,” “The Day Will Come,” and they sang it over and over again because it lent itself to subtle variations that they introduced to it in unison and almost as if by magic.
If he had anything at all, he had great discipline—physical, intellectual, and moral discipline. “Why is it that I can’t concentrate?” he asked himself. “Why can’t I?” Well, he knew.
AS CLERKS, mechanics, and armorers broke for their tea they could hear the singing, at a distance, of “Ha Yom Yavoe.” It crossed rooftops of corrugated iron and drifted through the palms, sweeter because, in the main, it was faint. As the vagaries of the breeze muted it or sometimes made it loud, the song itself, beyond its own rhythm and melody, had the rhythm and melody of the wind.
Annalise made the tea for the last time. She lit an army stove that was so black it would never get clean no matter what anyone did to it. And yet the flames that arose were as pure and blue as the most perfect sapphire. She filled a battered aluminum kettle with water from the Jordan, still sweet. As it boiled, she laid out several boxes of petits beurres, the milk, the lemons, and the sugar.
She cut the lemons with a short bayonet that lay on the board they used as a table, and threw a box of tea in the water just as it began to bubble. This was the army. They liked their tea black and boiled, scalding and heavily sugared. And though it was army tea it had the humid scent of blooming yellow roses.
The mechanics came in quickly, took their cups and stacks of cookies, and left to catch the last light of afternoon because they didn’t have enough lights to go around, and they had a never-ending line of vehicles to service and repair.
Shoshanna, Annalise, and the armorers stood fast in the ebb and flow of the distant music as the stove sang in the reddening light. Annalise would never return to the army. The expression was leshahrir, to be released, but to every soldier it meant to be free.
“So, Annalise,” said one of the armorers, a Moroccan, “what are you going to do? Are you going to get married?”
“How can she get married after knowing us?” the handsomest armorer interrupted. “How could she stand anyone else?”
They laughed at themselves, and it was endearing.
“Really, Annalise,” the handsome one said, “you’ll have to marry a student from the Technion. No one else would understand the way you talk when you try to tell people what you do. Electrons! Energy levels! Angstroms! What the hell are angstroms?”
“At the Technion, Shimon,” Annalise replied, so evenly in tone that no one would have guessed how long her heart had been broken, “the students are as young as you.”
“Then what about the professors?”
“They’re married.”
“All of them? Every single one?”
“The ones that are my age.”
“But there must be a few,” Shimon said, “one or two.”
“Yes, but it’s a matter of probabilities.”
“What are those?”
“That’s when you can’t—you know,” said the Moroccan. “A lot of those guys, they can’t—you know—because they go down in radioactive submarines and stuff.”
“You’re an idiot,” another armorer said. “An imbecile. Did any of your mother’s other children survive?”
“Everyone except me. They took my food.”
“She’ll visit,” Shoshanna said. “At least she can look in the window when she passes by, to see us slaving here.”
“Of course I’ll visit,” Annalise answered, knowing that she would not, with no reason to visit, that soon Shoshanna would be gone, the armorers replaced by other armorers, the faces in the window those of strangers, the handwriting in the ledgers entirely new. “Of course I’ll visit,” she said. But those years were over.
In some senses they had ended long before. They had ended when she had not married in her twenties. They had ended when, by her early thirties, she had no children. They had ended when her mother had been taken from her. They had ended when she and her father had stayed close to the sea, and their memories had been unable to dry and blow away on the wind. They had ended on the raft, when the Australian had either been too shy to respond to her or perhaps had been repulsed by the fuse within her that made her what she was. She had already dismissed him, because she herself had been dismissed so many times before.
This tea was the last. For many years now the armorers had seemed to her like boys, and finally the passage of time had brought the moment when she would make the formal separation from them. From now on, when she passed soldiers on the street, she would feel no connection. She would have left them and floated up into old age far earlier than she might have suspected.
In the long silence before Annalise would put down her tea, stand, brush the crumbs from her skirt, and begin to say her good-byes, Shoshanna had begun to cry, and had thought, Well, this is just what women do when they say good-bye.
When she saw Shoshanna, Annalise herself almost cried, but decided not to do so in front of the armorers, lest they know what she cried for. So she rose, and she straightened, and she looked ahead, toward the singing.
There, in the window, was the Australian, peering into the dark interior. At first his barbaric, red-haired visage, bobbing in the window frame like a Visigoth’s, was somehow inexplicable—perhaps because, without his glasses, he himself could not see. With eyes reddened by study and salt water, and with great difficulty in focusing, he peered in at the armorers and the clerks at their tea.
This was not unusual, and Shoshanna averted her eyes, for when men looked in—soldiers from other commands, taxi drivers, students at the language academy—it was to see her.
The armorers watched him take his glasses from a rigid case, and saw that, after he put them on, he smiled. Though at first one of them had been about to mock him, he was stopped by the Australian’s suddenly clear vision, by the powerful build, by his height, his evident self-possession, and by the air he had of someone coming strongly into his own.
Even Shoshanna was interested, a rare thing. But the Australian was looking right past Shoshanna and all her beauty. He was looking at the beauty of Annalise.
The Pacific
THIS WAS PROBABLY the last place in the world for a factory. There were pine-covered hills and windy bluffs stopped still in a wavelike roll down to the Pacific, groves of fragrant trees with clay-red trunks and soft greenery that made a white sound in the wind, and a chain of boiling, fuming coves and bays in which the water—when it was not rocketing foam—was a miracle of glassy curves in cold blue or opalescent turquoise, depending upon the season and depending upon the light.
A dirt road went through the town and followed the sea from poi
nt to point as if it had been made for the naturalists who had come before the war to watch the seals, sea otters, and fleets of whales passing offshore. The road took three or four opportunities to travel into the hills and run through long valleys onto a series of flat mesas, as large as battlefields, which for a hundred years had been an excellent place for raising horses. And horses still pressed up against the fences or stood in family groupings in golden pastures as if there were no such thing as time, and as if many of the boys who had ridden them had never grown up and had never left. At least a dozen fishing boats had once bobbed at the pier and ridden the horizon, but they had been turned into minesweepers and sent to Pearl Harbor, San Diego, and the Aleutians.
The factory itself, a long low building in which more than five hundred women and several hundred men made aircraft instruments, had been built in two months, along with a forty-mile railroad spur that had been laid down to connect it to the Union Pacific main line. In this part of California the railroad had been used heavily only during the harvests and was usually rusty for the rest of the year. Now even the spur was gleaming and weedless, and small steam engines pulling several freight cars shuttled back and forth, their hammerlike exhalations silencing the cicadas, breaking up perfect afternoons, and shattering perfect nights.
The main halls and outbuildings were only a mile from the sea but were placed in such a way, taking up almost all of the level ground on the floor of a wide ravine, that they were out of the line of fire of naval guns. And because they were situated in a narrow trench between hills, they were protected from bombing.