by Mark Helprin
On the second day, a truck came up from the rear with ammunition for an anti-tank gun. “Where’s the gun?” a master sergeant asked Harry after he rolled down the window, and then, when he saw Harry’s insignia peeking out of the blanket Harry clasped at the base of his neck, “Sir.”
“What gun?”
“G-Two says there’s supposed to be a captured eighty-eight at the intersection of this road and the front line,” the sergeant said over the rumble of the engine.
“How would they know?”
“Either ’cause someone told them, or from the air,” the sergeant replied.
“That’s the front line,” Harry stated, pointing to where the field began a hundred feet from where they stood. “There’s no gun here. We have an infantry company dug in north and south of the road. No armor, no gun.”
The sergeant looked exhausted. “We’ll just go back.”
His driver told him that to turn around they had to shovel out a space. “Do it,” he said, and then closed his eyes and sank back in his seat.
Harry walked to the rear of the truck. Two privates were shivering inside, sitting on crates of captured shell for the captured 88s. They also had quart containers of gun oil and carbon tetrachloride, ramrods, and dozens of rolls of new gun flannel. These were little bolts of cloth a foot high and as thick as a telephone pole. Every six inches or so, a blue line ran from edge to edge so the gunners would know where to cut the patches they slotted into the heads of their ramrods and ran through the barrels of the guns.
“Could you spare five or ten feet of one of those rolls?” Harry asked.
“Not without a trip to the stockade,” said one of the privates, with blue eyes and a rosacean complexion waxen with cold.
Harry dipped into his coat pockets. “How ’bout for some cigarettes?” He often used his officer’s ration of cigarettes as currency.
“How many?”
“What’s your price?”
The rosacean private thought for a moment. “One cigarette per section.”
“Per three,” Harry said.
“Two.”
“Okay.”
“How many you want?”
“Twenty.” That would be more than enough, he thought, to wrap around the dog. He began extricating half the cigarettes from a full pack as the private unrolled the flannel, counted the sections, and unsheathed a bayonet with which to cut it.
“Roll that up!” the sergeant commanded from where he had been watching in the snow.
Embarrassed, Harry put the cigarettes back into the pack. He hated the smell of tobacco on his fingers, but was able to make the replacement very quickly because of so much practice inserting cartridges into ammunition magazines. More than embarrassed, the private rolled up the flannel as if it were a window shade that goes berserk and rotates with a bang like that of a bomb going off.
“You,” the sergeant said, addressing both privates, although only one was guilty, “get out of the truck and shovel. The driver shouldn’t have to do it.” They jumped out and dug with their hands. The sergeant stayed at the back, guarding the contents. Engaging Harry in forced conversation, he said sir, with obvious contempt, whenever he could: Harry, a captain, was just like any other scrounger. But Harry didn’t care. The truck crew got back in, doors slammed, and the truck turned around. As it left, the back flap opened a wink and the rosacean private looked out to left and right as if the sergeant might be running alongside.
And then a whole roll of gun flannel came flying from the back like a depth charge catapulted off the fantail of a destroyer. Harry watched it find its arc. Many things now seemed to happen in slow motion, and this especially. The flannel was as white as the snow, pace the blue stripes, and when he caught it he said “Thank you,” silently, and lifted his left hand to acknowledge the gift. The rosacean private seemed satisfied, and disappeared behind the flap as the truck itself disappeared in the snow.
When Harry wrapped the flannel around the dog’s middle, then over the shoulders and around the neck and back crosswise under the belly, Debra, who had been frightened by a mortar barrage several miles to the north, suddenly stopped trembling. As if he had won the Nobel Prize, had a baby, or bet on a horse at four hundred to one, Harry went from position to position and handed out lengths of flannel. The troopers wrapped them around their heads like burnouses, deployed them more prosaically as scarfs, or pressed them into service as socks: they were tight in the boots, but clean, warm, and thick. “This is better,” Bayer said, “than getting laid.”
After everyone had taken what he needed, much was left. First Harry made a pair of ersatz socks for boots that, because they had stretched too much anyway, would not be tight even with the flannel. He wrapped a length around his head and neck, as the others had done, took off his coat, sweater, and shirts, and stood half naked in the snow, winding the flannel around his torso to serve as an undergarment. The risk to his core temperature was worthwhile, for when he put back his layers of clothing he felt clean and warm for the first time in weeks. This produced a pathetic euphoria.
He ate, drank a little hot water, brushed his teeth, and as it was quiet and he didn’t have the watch until four the next morning, he retired, sitting the dog on a bed of pine needles next to his sleeping bag and pulling a blanket over them both. No longer trembling, the dog fell asleep immediately. True, the wind that blew across Harry’s face was many degrees below freezing, but all else was covered and warm.
The cold air smelled especially good because there was no gunpowder in it. He could sleep until four A.M., and it was only six in the evening. After ten good hours, with no attack, no call to get up, no anxiety to wake him, he would be reborn. He slept, and dreamt not a dream but a precise recollection so vivid and exact that the illusion had no check, and was not only more desirable but somehow more real than sleeping in the snow on a front line pushed up to within easy range of German armor.
In the early twenties, after the Great War and its many casualties, the many more of the influenza epidemic, and the minor depression at the beginning of the decade, New York was as quiet and slow as an invalid who though he has crested his illness remains extraordinarily weak. Harry’s formative years were spent in the dip before the bustle and prosperity that would signify the rest of the decade all the way to the Crash at its end. As a child, he roamed freely about the city. He swam in the rivers even though he was forbidden to do so; climbed girders and bridges even though forbidden to do so; hitched rides on the back bumpers of buses and trolleys even though forbidden to do so; and wandered through the many worlds that were New York’s neighborhoods. This he was allowed. It was only one city, but no walker could see all of it even were he to walk forever, for it changed by the hour and no matter at what speed or with what duration one might try, it would never be compassed.
He liked to go to the Hudson River piers to look at the warships when they tied up—the gray four-stack destroyers from the World War and the gunboats remaining from the war with Spain, with their black cannon and white sides. This was in Hell’s Kitchen, which was tame compared to what it had been in the nineteenth century, and now controlled by gangs of Irish children highly alert to invasion of any type, including that of a lone Jew from Central Park West. As urchinesque as Harry was, he was immediately recognizable as a Jew and a swell, and he paid for this in bruises and blood. Because his antagonists, like him, were not yet ten, he was neither killed nor maimed, although he could have been. The unusual twist was that he admired them. He believed, as did they, that because they were Irish and he was Jewish, they were clean and he was dirty. The fact that he was highly scrubbed and they were often filthy was irrelevant. They were taller and lighter-colored, and their English, even if they said youse, was authoritative. When he spoke to them, he filtered out any hint of Yiddish syntax or intonation that otherwise marked his dialect. In short, although he was never quite sure that he was an American, he was sure that they were—no matter how Irish they were, no matter when they had
gotten off the boat (and some of them were still quite seasick). Not only did he want to be like them, he felt that somehow, fundamentally and indelibly, he really was like them. So he went there a lot, and was beaten up a lot.
“Why do you want to go to Hell’s Kitchen so much?” his father asked, which, translated from the Yiddish idiom, was “Don’t go to Hell’s Kitchen.”
“To see the ships.”
“Go down to Chelsea.”
“Chelsea’s Irish too.”
“It’s less warlike.”
“Still, Irish.”
“Then go to Hudson Street.”
“Too far away.”
“So take the subway.”
“It’s too expensive.”
“I’ll give you the money. Why don’t you go to . . . Little Italy? Do the Italians beat you up?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They think I’m Italian.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“They don’t think you’re Irish?”
“Why would they think I’m Irish?”
“I don’t know. They beat you up so much you’d think it might rub off on you.”
“I get along with them.”
“You get along with them?” His father was astounded.
“In a way.”
“Why not go to Yorkville?”
“I do go to Yorkville.”
“Where the Germans beat you up?”
“No, they’re too busy beating up the Negroes, who live on the edge of them.”
“Do the Negroes beat you up in Harlem?”
“They always say they will, but they never do.”
“Just don’t go to Hell’s Kitchen. Harry, they beat you up.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s America. I can go anywhere in America, I’m an American. Even Scarsdale.”
“Okay, but you can also get beaten up.”
“I can get strong, and learn to fight.”
“Harry, Harry,” his father said, looking at an eight-year-old with skinny limbs and muscles like shredded chicken. “Don’t waste your time on that. You could be a neurologist.”
“I don’t want to be a neurologist.”
“An internist.”
“I don’t want to be an internist.”
“What do you want to be, Jack Johnson?”
Harry paid an Irish kid named Dennis O’Rourke ten cents a week to teach him how to fight. Dennis O’Rourke didn’t know how to fight either, but for ten cents a week he gave it some thought, and between what he and Harry could think up together, learn from watching prizefights, and discover in practice, Harry did learn to hold his own, and could do so at times against three or four opponents at once, which, after the first time he did it, changed his life forever.
Then he began to exercise by running around Central Park on the bridle paths. Mocked and cursed by the aristocracy on their horses, he knew that his running six—and, later, twelve—miles was better than their riding the distance. When he was in high school he went over to Yorkville and learned to fence. He kept that up in college, where he also rowed and boxed. Although he was a welterweight, and then a middleweight, he trained with heavyweights. He was fast and powerful enough to do so, but as this was always to his disadvantage, the Harvard boxing coach once asked him why he kept it up. “In life,” Harry had replied, “when you fight, you don’t get to exclude the heavyweights.”
After college, he stopped boxing. At the gyms where he might have continued, real prizefighters of much greater skill would have hurt him badly, and he knew it. But he did everything else that he had done, including rowing from the Columbia boathouse on the East River, which was unsatisfactory water. A college acquaintance whose full name was, truly, Allis Grosvenor Elliot Vliet Dukynk worked in an investment house that transferred him to London for two years. Harry had always dreamed of working in such a place, where the money was supposed to be, but being a humanities major he could neither be sure of nor imagine what kind of work they might actually require of him other than to wear the right kind of clothes. Because of the transfer, he was invited to use Allis’s single shell at the Dukynk estate fronting an arm of the Croton Reservoir. Allis Grosvenor Elliot Vliet Dukynk was under the impression that if unexercised a wooden boat would fall apart, and was relieved that Harry undertook the task of rowing it once a week during the season. A car would be waiting for him at Harmon, the Dukynk servants would give him lunch after he rowed, and the car would take him back to the train. Being relatively asocial, Harry refused the lunch but accepted the rest. Allis had taken him upstate and showed him where the boat was hidden among a copse of pines near the water—which is what he dreamed of as he slept in the snow in Germany.
Every Wednesday, into November, weather permitting, he rowed on an empty lake with hundreds of miles of shoreline, tranquil bays, and extensions of water as smooth as glass. In August of ’38, Harry was living at home and working in his father’s loft without pay. He would take the New York Central up the Hudson to Harmon and be out on the lake by eleven. Fishermen were allowed in rowboats, which had to be licensed, but there were very few of them and so seldom did they go out other than on weekends that Harry had never seen one. The Croton Reservoir system, one of several that supplied water to New York City, was so huge, so surrounded by undeveloped buffers of forest land, and kept so empty of people that it seemed to be not forty miles from Times Square but somewhere in Canada or Maine. A few grandfathered estates came right down to the water, but even they had to comply with restrictions in view of protecting its purity. Allis’s boat, because it was supposed to be a rowboat, had a serial number on its bows, and was thus perfectly legal. It glowed rose and yellow in the August sun and was almost as fragrant as the pines amid which it slept.
Harry woke it up by turning it over to prepare it for being hoisted onto his shoulders and carried down to the lake. In ninety degrees of windless sun there was no need for a shirt, and he had changed into a pair of khaki rowing shorts and hung his clothes on the stub of a pine branch. Through the trees was a prairie of blue water as still as a mirror. The heat had silvered its surface not with mist but with a diffusion of light. He carried down the boat and oars, then set it in the shallows and locked them into the oarlocks. Without a dock, entering the boat was not uncomplicated, but two strokes later he was in deep open water.
Felt through the oars, the smooth resistance as he moved across the lake was a beautiful thing not least because of its alliance with a steady cadence and the rise of the heart to meet it in propelling the boat at the speed of a man running. The oarsman was the motor, his steadiness and discipline of technique yielding a constant velocity. As the lake’s hypnotic surface and rugged shoreline passed by, they made for thought and recollection as nature put anxiety and ambition on holiday and substituted in their place the genuine coin of the world.
Once, in the middle of October, when the sun was low, the open water, normally windblown, was flat except in his wake, which sparkled with a kind of light he had never before seen. Its flashes were triangular, their bases resting upon the surface. In a long line back, it seemed as if a group of sailboats were following his shell. But more remarkable still was that when a patch of water in the distance was disturbed by a gust of wind, the blinding triangular flashes, miniature sails bursting with fire, moved as if in an electric regatta. Turning, weaving, tacking, coming about, slowing, accelerating, rocking in the breeze and bouncing almost into the air, they possessed the speed and chaos of those swarms of white moths that sometimes hover over a field or take possession of a clearing. Each blinding flash was a perfect reiteration of the sun, each only instantaneous, its life too short to note much less to follow or record. Nonetheless, when and though it would disappear, it would appear again, or others like it would arise upon the same course resurrected, marvelously nimble and impossibly bright. Against a background of parti-colored foliage and a deep blue
sky, this regatta of golden suns racing at high speed was so striking and hypnotic that Harry had almost rowed straight into the shore. Catching himself in time, he rested his oars and watched the hundred million flares, a world unto themselves and more joyful than swallows. With every power within him, and against sadness he could not deny, he had hoped that these were souls, that they were free to come with the light, and that they could rise at will and hover in the air to overlook all that they had never left.
Now he would row eight miles, entering just before the midpoint an extraordinary extension of the reservoir, accessible only over a hundred yards of six-inch shallows pouring across a bed of small glistening stones. To row past this obstruction and against the current, he could not dip his oars as deeply as usual, and had to increase his stroke to the point where it looked panicky. Then he would glide off the bar and into a long, narrow lake rounded at its far end and encompassed by granite ledges and stands of pine. The trees were uniform, dense, and dark. All the land around the lake was owned by the City of New York. There was no access road to it; fishing boats could not get in over the bar; there were no predators, no people; and the water, issuing from deep springs, was purer and fresher than that of the pristine reservoir itself. This Eden was Harry’s destination every time he rowed. At the end of the hidden lake, before he would start back, he would turn the boat and sit, listening to his heartbeat. In great heat, he would lift the water in the cup of his hand and drink, allowing it to cool him as it spilled through his fingers.
Now he raced toward the lake and its inlet, increasing speed as he closed, covered in sweat, burning up, and yet he was hardly exhausted, and each forward sweep invited the next as if with the easy assist of the wind. But the only wind in his final sprint to the bar was the ten-mile-per-hour breeze from the bow as a result of his forward momentum, which vanished as he glided over the shallows and was slowed by the exit current.