by Mark Helprin
Martin blinked a simple Y. He did remember. He had originated it.
“It didn’t occur to me when you said that, but when I was in college I knew the most extraordinary person. At least, a person to whom the most extraordinary thing had happened. The tragedy of his wealthy family was that he was blind from birth or shortly thereafter: I don’t know the circumstances.
“Though he lived in the dark, the decoration of his apartment had been accomplished as if in service to a client with the keenest appreciation of color and form. The blind can appreciate form, of course, but not by sight; and color, but only by heat. He had never seen proportions all together making a whole. He had never seen a face, or a color. He didn’t know the beauty of one shade fading into another, or the attraction of changing light, like one of those precisely turned engines in Cavendish, its brass and mirrors casting rays according to the physicist’s command.
“But”—Harry leaned forward—“one morning, as he was getting out of his bath, dizzy and disoriented with heat, he fell, hit his head, and immediately”—Harry violently snapped his fingers—“he could see. Strong light shone down from a lamp above. He had never seen light. The wall upon which his towel bar was mounted—these he knew by touch—was a deep green, and the towel bar itself a highly polished brass shining in the light. As he stood looking at this, having risen as if lifted, it was so beautiful to him, he who had no conception of light, that he thought he had died, and that this—a towel bar on a bathroom wall—was heaven. He thought he was in the dwelling of God and the angels. Overwhelmed, he shook and he wept, partly from gratitude but in the main because the world, now written in full, was almost too wonderful to bear.
“There, in the light shining down from a bathroom ceiling, was the selfsame glory of the most massive suns. The man saw God in the towel bar in his bathroom. He was able to see and feel without the obstruction of training, conformity, necessity, or the ordered blindness of habit.
“I may never see you again. I may die before you. You may die before me. What can I say to a man of the widest range I’ve ever known, who is now made prisoner in his own body, except to keep in mind my once-blind friend, for neither of us has a fair or promising choice except to follow his lead and to see, I only hope, that concealed in the world we have is a world greater than we can imagine.”
It was understood without announcement that Martin could not eat with the rest of them and had been fed before. Aside from blinking, with Harry his only interpreter, he could not participate. But this was not the first social affair after his paralysis. He wanted company and conversation, and had he the energy he might have told Harry that observing in silence was in some ways better than being on tap to be witty, or even just to speak. Being present without obligation was much like watching a movie, but with a realism unparalleled by anything in a theater—in full and perfect color, 195 degrees of view in three dimensions, stereoscopic vision, true sound, and the touch of air, aromas, perfumes. . . . By command of circumstance, Martin receded, almost contentedly.
“What do you do with your days?” Claire asked Harry, not quite out of the blue.
“Our camp is north of Leicester, at Quorn House,” he said. “You may have heard of it. We have the great house but we live in rows of tents. Bouncing back and forth from one to the other makes us classless.”
“It doesn’t make you middle class?” the Texan asked.
“We don’t do averages. It’s feast or famine, like the classic problem of warming yourself by the fire. Unless you turn like a rotisserie, one side is too hot, the other too cold.”
“So you pivot?” the Texan’s wife asked.
“I spend as much time as I can in the house. Many of the boys feel uncomfortable there because they can’t get used to the elegance. They’re always aware of it, as if they were in the lobby of the Roxy, staring in wonder at the high ceiling. But it’s cold in the tents, and the smell of kerosene never leaves.”
“But what do you do?” Claire asked.
“You really want to know?”
“It’s why I asked.”
“We rise in the dark and spend time cleaning our quarters, bathing, dressing. Then we eat breakfast. It’s still dark when we start our run. My stick—that is, my detachment, the men with whom I will jump into France (I don’t think that’s a secret)—does twelve miles each morning.” There was a slight gasp. “Not everyone does, but we do, in boots, with weapons, ammunition, helmet, and a light pack.”
“Twelve miles?” Margaret asked.
“Every goddamned day. When we get back, we eat again. Then we go out on the field and do calisthenics and hand-to-hand fighting for an hour and a half. Every day.”
“I hope you can take a nap,” Margaret said, maternally, and, in Harry’s view, insanely.
“No nap. We go to the firing range for a few hours. After that, maintaining equipment, map study, briefing. I study French and German every day, for less than half an hour but regularly. Then a shower, dinner, an hour’s free time in which I usually read but most everyone else plays cards. It’s like a casino.”
“You don’t play cards?” the Texan asked.
“I never learned how. The only game I like is chess. And then lights out. Sometimes we have a movie, sometimes there’s no routine because we go on an exercise, or jump. Rarely do we get leave, but when we do I come to London. In camp the water’s cold, the air’s cold. After a while the cold, the mud, even jumping out of airplanes, become the default conditions of life.”
“What weapon?” the Texan asked. Though old enough so that the draft passed way over him, he was an excellent shot.
“All weapons, including German, French, Russian, and Italian.” Turning to his British hosts and Chester, he said, “We have bazookas, but sometimes the PIAT. The standard weapon is the M1, but I have a special situation with the M1 Carbine.” Here it was as if he were describing a villa he had just bought in the south of France, and how he would refurbish it. He knew that this was in its way pathetic, but the hand he had been dealt was now so close to his heart he was ashamed of neither his enthusiasm nor his concentration.
“The M1 is long and heavy, almost ten pounds. With the stock folded, the carbine is half the length and less than two-thirds the weight, although I have a wood stock, because it gives the carbine a better balance. It’s worth a little bit of extra weight and a fair amount of length. Because of its longer barrel and greater mass, the M1 is accurate out to a quarter of a mile. You need it for what the infantry does, so it’s standard. The carbine normally is accurate to less than two-thirds that range, but in a pinch it does better. That’s because the M1 has an eight-round clip and requires a pull of the trigger for each shot, but the carbine has a thirty-round magazine and can fire at seven hundred and fifty rounds per minute.”
“What does that do?” the Texan’s wife asked.
“It means that in two seconds you can put thirty bullets into a target, as opposed to two at most with the rifle. The thirty will spread to cover so much of the target box that you’re likely to get a hit. That’s why we have two designations, accuracy range and effective range. In practicing, you wouldn’t waste ammunition that way, but you would if circumstances demanded it. Ammunition is heavy. You can’t ever have enough of it, and you have to carry it. Just from the weight I save from carrying the carbine rather than the rifle, I can carry a hundred extra rounds. And loading the rounds into the magazine is easier than clipping them, and loading the magazine into the carbine is easier and faster than inserting the clip into the rifle. If the enemy is assaulting you and you have to reload once every thirty shots, you’re a lot better off than reloading every eight. With all the other equipment we have to carry, the carbine’s lesser weight saves us. It’s superior by far.”
“Except in accuracy,” the Texan said. His small mustache accented his very blue, darty eyes. “I have a bias toward accuracy and against squirrels. Granted, squirrels don’t shoot back, but I have to say that one accurate shot is worth its w
eight in—what’s scarce these days?”
“Everything,” said Claire.
Like a magician at the cusp of his trick, Harry was delighted with expectation. Lifting his head, he said, “That’s where my special relation to the carbine comes in. Mine is as accurate as, or more so than, the M1.”
“How did you manage that?” Chester asked. “Or is it a military secret?”
“Unfortunately it isn’t a military secret, being of little value in that it can’t be generally replicated. What we did was this: My detachment consists of seven men and is devoted to a special purpose. I went up the chain of command all the way to a lieutenant general and received permission for each of us to take two carbines to the range each time we went. We compared them for accuracy, and returned the lesser of the two. Every day thereafter, we would check out a fresh weapon, compare it to the one we had retained, and keep whichever was better. They vary, of course, according to the peculiarities of manufacture, quirks in metallurgy, how new was the blade of the machine tool that shaped them, the concentration of its operator . . . God only knows.
“By this method, after months of comparison and subjecting ourselves to double gun-cleaning and the armorers to an absolute hell of record-keeping, we nicked, as it were, those carbines in the top one or two percent of accuracy. But we didn’t stop there. We applied the same process to the ammunition, which also varies by batch, putting aside the stable and accurate loads once we had discovered them.
“It comes down to this. My carbine, like those of my men, while shorter than an M1, lighter in weight, easier to load, and able to carry thirty rounds at a time and fire on full automatic, is, like the M1, accurate to about a quarter of a mile. And we are practiced to use it to the peak of its capacities. The squad has the firepower of a platoon. The individual has almost the firepower of a squad.”
When Harry finished, no one said anything. It was as if he had committed some sort of faux pas, although he didn’t know which one. And then he realized that they were not impressed. They neither admired what he had done nor shared in his enthusiasm. If not embarrassed, they were at least put off—and sad for him almost to the point of pity, because he had spoken too much and they had seen his exceptional intelligence made common by the needs of war. He didn’t understand, and never understood, and had never been able to accustom himself to the society into which—as what he had called a Jew out of water—he had been only half, and even then merely provisionally, accepted once he had arrived at Harvard. He would never know the rules by nature or intuition, never know when force and brilliance are best reined in, or how to rein them in, never know what was right to say in dinner conversation in any setting but that of a boy and his father eating at a kitchen table on the eleventh floor next to an echoing alley off Central Park West, using just a few utensils so as not to make washing difficult, while, as he remembered it most, a cool spring wind whistled through the iron gates that closed off the back courtyards from the street. There he learned to speak freely, with consideration only of the substance of what he said, and not a thought about the intricacies of its reception.
So he ended, and perhaps added to whatever transgression he had committed, by saying, “I’m fond of my carbine, and have etched my name on the stock. I killed some Germans with one that was far less accurate, and now I may kill more, which may help to prevent little clouds of parachutes from blooming over the parks, gardens, and parade grounds of London, and keep the Germans swaying beneath them from landing on your roofs and crashing through your skylights.”
After some time had passed in which silver upon china and the slight hiss of the candles were the only sounds, Harry, not solely out of politeness, asked Claire what she did with her days.
“I work in a factory.”
“Making?”
“Field kitchens.”
“Would you please make them so that the food tastes better?”
“’Fraid not.”
“What part do you play?”
“Ophelia.”
“Ophelia’s the one,” he asked, “who makes the fittings that drown the Spam in gravy?”
“No, she bolts on the clamps that hold the gas canisters and the lines that lead to the burners.”
“All day long?”
“All day long, in Slough, and then she goes home to nothing.”
“But she reads.”
“Of course she does. She reads. She dreams of splendors. She remembers before the war and imagines after. And, someday, she’ll get on a ship in winter and glide happily and sadly over two oceans, to summer and home.”
“What if the war ends when it’s summer in England?”
“You know what? Just the way you were sharp about your carbine, I’ve been sharp about that.”
“About what?”
“About the schedule for when the war ends. I’ll be dismissed from my factory, which will stop making field kitchens long before the fighting stops. They’ll look at the battlefields and see that it’s likely to come to a close within a certain length of time. And when the battles are still raging, the gates will shut, our war will be over, and I’ll go home. If it’s summer here, I’ll wait until winter. If it’s winter, I’ll go, knowing that my job is done.”
“You don’t want to stay?” Margaret asked.
Claire shook her head back and forth, her eyes closed. She was lonely, too.
Two trains left for Leicester that night, one from Marylebone and one from St. Pancras. Harry was determined to make the first from Marylebone and keep the second in reserve. He simply could not be absent without leave, not only because of the penalties but because they had no idea where they might be moved before the invasion or when the camps would be sealed or struck. As an officer and a member of an advance element, he had to be available when it was expected of him—as it was also expected and required that he would without hesitation leave the warmth and color of London, and leave a woman alone in her bed when he should have been next to her, for a line of tents that he could hardly see in the cold fog.
He hoped at least that, availing herself of any one of the many trains that left Paddington and made a stop at Slough, Claire would walk with him through Hyde Park to the station, and he broached with his hosts the subject of leaving in time for this. But the Texan jumped in and promised a cab.
“There aren’t any cabs,” Harry said. “What if we can’t find one?”
“We’ll leave early enough.”
So they stayed on, adjourning to the salon and talking about the war a lot, which Harry didn’t like, because there was nothing he could do about it except what he was doing, and whatever that might be there would be no trace of it in history. They talked about British politics as well, which Harry found theoretically of interest but less so than the chance, now gone, of walking through the park with Claire.
Half an hour before her train from Paddington they rushed out as if from a sinking ship, politely but quickly, and with the women’s heels clicking upon the pavement like castanets they double-timed to Exhibition Road, where there were no cars at all, much less taxis.
“What shall we do?” Claire asked.
“Walk toward the park.” They were already doing that. “Maybe a taxi will come along. If not, we’re headed in the right direction.”
“No,” the Texan said. “We should go down to Brompton Road. There’ll be much more traffic there.”
“We’ll split up,” Harry proposed. “You don’t have to make a train. If you get a taxi, come along this way and pick us up. If we get one, we’ll just go.”
“Okay” was the reply, and the Americans turned on their heels and walked determinedly in the opposite direction. Everyone had been breathing hard and moving fast. Even so, Harry and Claire picked up the pace. “Can we make it?” she asked.
“If you can keep this up.”
“I can.”
“Then yes.”
“Is there time,” she asked as they sped forward on the deserted street, “or will there be tim
e, for a kiss—or two?”
“I’ve been wanting to kiss you ever since I walked into that room.”
“I know,” she said.
In a single movement, he stopped suddenly and stepped in front of her so that she would run into him, and when she did they first clasped hands, and then their hands, like the receivers on rifles, slid up the other’s forearms until each held the other by the elbows, which locked them tightly at the hips and enabled them to press their upper bodies together, and then he kissed her, lightly at first, like stroking, with rhythm in each touch, all in what seemed like seconds. He opened her coat, and then his, and found out how thin and conforming silk is, as if it were not there, but better because it is. He kissed her neck, and his hands found her back and then her breasts, which he bent to kiss. Harry and Claire, the war suspended by the only thing in the world that could suspend it, embraced in the dark, standing alone on Exhibition Road. A wind came through the trees, the kind of wind that comes only at night, and shook droplets of water rather gently from the leaves, in a shower that wet nothing. Because the street lamps were extinguished, the museums were closed, and the lights of London were blacked out, they could have been deep in the forest.
Both knew that he would soon go back into the war and had no say in when or if he could come down to London. Five years had been enough to instruct her in that uncertainty, and, for him, two with the shock of ten. When they had exchanged addresses on little pieces of paper in the hallway as everyone was donning coats and looking for umbrellas, the papers seemed more powerfully sad than paper was ever meant to be, and when thrust into their coat pockets the notes were like the lockets that hold remembrances of the dead. All they could do was kiss, and so they kissed, and the purest and kindest that was in them echoed from one to the other.
Until a horse-drawn cab came racing up the street, and as it stopped they did too, and got in, with the Texan and his wife pretending unsuccessfully not to have seen. “Paddington Station,” the Texan said. “Can you gallop this horse?” The cab driver answered with a crack of his whip. Claire was all red and disheveled, but no one could see this in the dark, except everybody.