A Dove of the East: And Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A JEW OF PERSIA

  BECAUSE OF THE WATERS OF THE FLOOD

  RUIN

  FIRST RUSSIAN SUMMER

  KATRINA, KATRIN’

  SHOOTING THE BAR—1904

  LIGHTNING NORTH OF PARIS

  MOUNTAIN DANCING IN TRUCHAS

  LEAVING THE CHURCH

  KATHERINE COMES TO YELLOW SKY

  ELISHA HOSPITAL

  END OF THE LINE

  THE LEGITIMACY OF MEDIUM BEAUTY

  THE HOME FRONT

  WILLIS AVENUE

  ELIZABETH RIDINOURE

  THE SILVER BRACELET

  ON “THE WHITE GIRL” BY JAMES WHISTLER

  BACK BAY CONSERVATORY

  A DOVE OF THE EAST

  Copyright © 1975, 1974, 1973, 1969 by Mark Helprin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  The following stories appeared originally in the New Yorker: “Because of the Waters of the Flood,” “Elisha Hospital,” “Leaving the Church,” “The Home Front,” “Willis Avenue,” and “Ruin.” “A Jew of Persia” and “First Russian Summer” first appeared in Moment.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous paperback edition as follows:

  Helprin, Mark.

  A dove of the East and other stories/Mark Helprin.—1st Harvest ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  [PS3558.E4775D68 1990]

  813'.54—dc20 89-26880

  ISBN 0-15-626140-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN-13: 978-0156-03101-1 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603101-9 (pbk.)

  Text set in Adobe Garamond

  Designed by Liz Demeter

  Printed in the United States of America

  C E G I K J H F D B

  FOR THEODORE MORRISON

  Amor mi mossey che mi fa parlare.

  —INF. II

  A JEW OF PERSIA

  HE HAD tried to explain for his sons the sense of mountains so high, sharp, and bare that winds blew ice into waves and silver crowns, of air so thin and cold it tattooed the skin and lungs with the blue of heaven and the bronze of sunshining rock crevasse. He had tried to tell them of the house in which he had lived, made of mountain rock, with terraces, and ten fires within—when shutters were thrown open and hit the stone like the report of a shell in an echoing valley he could see mountains of white ice two hundred miles distant. The eggs there were milk-white, the milk like cloud. In winter it often snowed in one day enough to trap and kill horses and bulls. He had been a sawyer, guiding his saws through countless timbers all day long in the open air, so that his body was as intensely powerful as (he would say) gunpowder in a brass casing. Then, when he was younger and worked at the timbers, he could by the pressure of his hands and arms break a heavy iron chain. And there was not much else, at least as he thought of it twenty and more years later. These things were so deep and wonderful that they could bear telling a thousand times a thousand times. But he could not say them even once to his sons, for they did not know Persian, which he had almost forgotten, and his Hebrew was of the shacks and hot streets and blood-guttered markets.

  This life of his came to be like the fall of an angel, and yet by the tenets of his belief he believed himself lucky. He had come alone from Persia’s mountainous north, where the air was cross-currented and symphonically clear, to Tel Aviv where air was obsolete and the entire city heated like potters’ kilns in Iran. When in late 1948 he had stepped off a small ship in Jaffa, he had said to himself, Najime, it will be profitable to find the large oven which heats up the city, for there they are undoubtedly drying vast amounts of wood, and may need me to saw. For several hours he had glided about the city in his boots of fur and leather asking passers-by in Persian, “Where is the great oven?” The passers-by, obviously ignorant of Persian, jaded by the sight of ambulant wolflike lunatic-looking Persians and Turcomans, would throw up their hands, shrug their shoulders, and say to themselves in Yiddish, He should only not kill me dear God. And Najime would continue on, still in search of the all-pervasive heat.

  Instead of his crooked, ancient, and vast stone house with ether forcing its way shrieking through the cracks, and fires flickering, instead of sheepskins and earthenware pitchers of iced white wine, instead of the little synagogue where sawyers, sheepherders, and merchants watched the sun rise golden from a cradle of distant mountains and light gold chains coming triangularly from the ceiling, instead of tall candles, and contests of strength in the bitter cold, he found a tin shack almost melting, filthy sacks for a bed, no breeze, rationed food, a synagogue of brown Yemenites and Moroccans who were softer and soaking in Arabic and the desert and knowing a God who possessed another face than his rugged, whistling, clean, and mystic God of altitudes, hunters, and eagles’ flight. That was the angel’s fall, and he often inflated himself with longing, letting the remaining Persian words circle around by themselves in his head, reluctant to talk to others whose dialects were not the same.

  But his balance on the scaffolded logs had long before taught him of polarities, and he was well aware of the blessings of his situation. To his eldest son Yacov he had often said, There is plenty of balance here for what was lost. Of course he knew that the boy, knowing no other country, brought up as it were in a sewing box, would never sense except in the airy sadness of dreams what Persia had been like, and that since he had become a sergeant in the army and had been in battles he had learned his own lessons and only tolerated his strange father, although he loved him, for his father was a rough peasant who had walked halfway across Asia from deep in the past, and the young man already had a small car and a telephone of his own. But Najime went on anyway, as he often did, saying, “There are two main things which balance out the loss, two main things. The first is that I have come to a Jewish country where I can live as a Jew (although you know I lived as a Jew there too), and have helped to build the third commonwealth, a new land for us. The soldiers I see are our soldiers, and that is good, and Hebrew is our language. That is good.” He stopped, beaming, and poured himself a glass of grapefruit juice from an old bottle. His son looked at him with an habitual incredulousness.

  “Nu?” said the stocky ex-sergeant. “And...?”

  “That’s all,” said Najime, “what else?”

  “What is the second reason? You said there were two.”

  “I can't tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  "I can't say.

  “Nonsense,” said Yacov, slamming the table with his fist. “You always say there are two reasons and then give only one.”

  “I know,” said Najime, strangely upset, then retreating into his thoughts and memories like an old man.

  “You are not such an old man, you know. You can’t do this. What is the second reason? I know. You can’t tell me.”

  They had had this exchange a hundred times a hundred times, and always with the same result. But once at a wedding Najime had consumed three bottles of wine. Then when his son had pressed him for the second reason he had blurted out, “Because I saw the Devil, and he had for in his eyes.” He had started to shake, and the boy in the new unif
orm had seen the hair on his father’s arms and neck stand up. What did he mean? Certainly he had not seen the Devil. But from then on he would elaborate no further, and any inquiry about (directly) the Devil, or (indirectly in order, he thought, subtly to pry out the secret) the strange condition of having fur in the eyes, brought Yacov a hard slap in the face and a long stream of expletives in mountain Persian.

  And so they had continued to live out their lives in the Ha Tikva Quarter, a place where all the functions of human existence combined ungraciously and people were struck like bells in no chorus, camel bells upset and sad but active in contrast to the still green palms, a tree with a lisp in the wind and infinite patience, variegated sun shadows, shelterer of doves, the green rafters of Tel Aviv. All this in the Ha Tikva was sometimes struck down by the Hamsin, and more significantly, sometimes blown onto another course by winds of war and death and change. And at these times the inhabitants paused in the struggle, and very like sailors on a coasting ship breaching a passage of high cliffs and tumultuous blue-green waters into an unknown gulf or sea, waited for the change, marking a point in their lives, aware of time and their part in it. And one day this violent wind was blowing through Ha Tikva, at least for Najime and his son.

  Najime was sitting on his chair, listening to the BBC Arabic service (of which he understood nothing) and looking out onto the street. In the distance he saw the tops of a few skyscrapers, and closer, a row of palms which caught a sea breeze never to reach him. Closer still was a series of old concrete buildings which had been built with sea water a generation or more before and which like lepers had been losing bits and pieces ever since. Before him was a street of hard-packed dust lined with sterile date palms, tin shacks, dogs, and chickens. Yacov was sitting in the back of the room cleaning a submachine gun he had stolen from the army. He had its various parts and springs assembled unassembled before him ready to be oiled, and was about to begin work on the magazines when he was startled by the crash of his father’s chair.

  Najime had crouched like a hunter among the rocks, and was staring out the window, jaw hanging open. “What is it!” screamed Yacov, as he like the trained soldier he was vaulted over the kitchen table to his father’s side, wincing in mid-air as he heard the several dozen springs, nuts, and molded pieces of his gun jangle onto the floor.

  “Its him.”

  “Who?” said Yacov, staring in terrified sympathy at the familiar street.

  “That man. The one with the flat chin and half-grown beard.”

  “That little guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well what about him? What’s with you? Are you crazy?”

  The little old man on the street, in appearance a cross between a beggar and a mushroom, turned into an alley and vanished. Yacov glanced at the metal pieces on the floor and then at his father. He was disgusted and perplexed. But his father’s wells had been tapped. He picked up his son and threw him across the room onto the bed, ran to close the shutters, bolted the door, and stood there in chevrons of light.

  “You dog-headed baby, you cackling jackass. What do you know? Now listen, because the time has come. I was afraid of it for twenty-five years, but it stares me in the face at last and I feel like dying, and that is the only way to enter a fight. I will fight,” he said, upraising a still very strong arm, “and I will die, but I will use sword and dagger until they heat from friction in the air. The dust will rise about me. I will be fierce.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Yacov, who was himself now terrified like a child whose father is in danger. The older man sat down, and after a short silence, began to speak in determined vision of the past.

  “I was a young man, the strongest in the village, at least among the Jews, because I sawed beams all day and had done so from the earliest I could remember. Because of that I had great lungs, great balance, and great muscular power. I was a skilled swordsman too, for there was no sword in the world which was not to me as light as a feather compared to my saws, sledgehammers, and axes. I could run for half a day at a time up and down the valleys, and raise beams alone which five men together would not approach. Naturally, I won most of the contests.

  “One day a messenger came from the Grand Rabbi in the capital. In the presence of our Rabbi and the elders he commanded us to collect our gold, our silver, our jewels, our coins, and bring them to him in the capital on an appointed day. He said that the Jews of the world were in the midst of returning, that the ingathering of the exiles was about to begin, that all the Jews of Iran, and India, the East, and the West, were giving their treasure. You can imagine how it struck us. Two thousand years, and at last we were leaving our beloved mountains for the land of our fathers.

  “Although we were rich in many things and close to God, we were nevertheless a poor village. All of our gold and silver including everything from the synagogue itself filled only one sack on a donkey. On the other side, to balance the load, we placed a sack of dried and smoked meats, cheeses, and dried fruits. I was to go alone in order not to attract attention, but fully armed, as there were many bandits in those mountains at the time, and probably still are. I had the finest sword and dagger in the village. We attempted to borrow a rifle from the Muslims, but they would not hear of it. On top of the sacks we put false containers which made it seem as if we had a donkey loaded with dried dung. I was dressed poorly, my weapons hidden. After a good nights sleep and a meal, I set out.

  “Three days from our village and any other I arrived at a great pass in the mountains, to which I had been only once before, as a child. This pass is essentially a vast gorge with paths cut into the rock walls on either side. Once you have chosen a side you must stay with it until the end, about an hour’s travel, because a sane donkey would not walk backwards with no room to turn. The other path is completely inaccessible although only a stone’s throw distant, because the gorge in between is easily a kilometer deep. It was this pass which kept the railways, armies, and telegraphs from our village. It was this barrier which allowed us to follow our own desires freely, and yet because of it the bandits were also free and they plagued us.

  “But no bandit had ever struck there, simply because were he to have done so and encountered greater force he would have had no way to escape, and besides, the place was dangerous enough just to traverse. At the end of the pass was a government station full of troops. So if one reached the entrance he assumed himself safe from attack. Naturally the troops themselves exacted a small extra-legal tax, but that was looked upon as inevitable, as a sort of toll.

  “I found myself at the entrance to the pass, thinking I was safe from bandits and even exempt from the soldiers’ ‘tax.’ If the Grand Rabbi had treasure coming to him from all parts of the country, he had undoubtedly donated part of it to an official in the palace to make sure that it arrived intact. My donkey had a bad right eye, which was lucky for me. My natural inclination was to travel on the left, with the gorge on my right, and since the animals left eye was best, that is what we were forced to do. I made sure the sacks were evenly balanced, put a blinder on his right eye so that he would look only at the path, and said a prayer. Then I led him out.

  “We were doing well, and the animal’s brown legs were steady and not shaking as they would have done had he been other than a donkey and smart enough to fear heights. Halfway through I saw two men, one on each path. They were bandits, and each one had a rifle. How clever they were! The one on the far side trained his rifle on me, while the other calmly awaited my approach. What have you got there, Jew, said the one closest to me. Just dung for fires, I said. (I must also have said sir.)

  “He believed me, and was going to let me pass when the other one, on the far side, said, Look in his sacks, little brother, for I think there is gold there. It seemed very strange that he should know that, and he too was rather strange. Even from that distance I sensed something about him which frightened me, and the donkey was very agitated in his presence. Well, they thought they had the mastery of design in
that matter, but they hadn’t. Perhaps if I had been carrying just smoked meats or tools or my own money, I would not have been able to think out a way to beat them. There were after all two of them, each with a rifle and a knife. I had only a sword and dagger. And most important, I could do nothing to the older one across the gorge who in complete safety had his rifle aimed at my heart. Even were he not there I could not have gone in any but one direction, straight into his little brother, who was by no means little. But I was carrying the wealth of my father and my father’s father, and of all my cousins, and of the synagogue in the village. And it was for a very special purpose, very special indeed, so I thought so hard my head began to boil and the veins in my hands stood out. (I was also quite frightened.)

  “After I had thought of what to do it seemed so simple and obvious that I laughed out loud, and it echoed in the gorge. They looked at one another in confusion, but then the older one said, Little brother, we can also rob madmen. Then the little brother ordered me to spill out my sacks for him. No sir, I said, you cannot make me do that, even if you kill me. If I am to be robbed that is one thing, robbing myself is another.

  “He thought for a while and then said, That makes sense, Jew, and then very casually went to the sack of dried fruits and meats and began to go through it. You see he was not afraid of me because I was a Jew. When you say ‘I am a Jew,’ they think you are weak. But of course we are as strong as anyone else, and because of that we often give them big surprises. Afterwards they hate us because they think we have tricked them. But usually it is they who have tricked themselves. Their eyes have done the tricking. As soon as little brother saw my clothing he lost all fear, because knowing that I was a Jew he did not think there was a man underneath.

  “He has false sacks of dung, he yelled to his brother, and then began to lay out the meat and fruit against the wall of the path next to the donkey. I knew exactly what to do; it had come to me in a flash. I came close to him and said, Keep the meat and fruit, eat well, but in God’s mercy let me pass. He looked up and said, I am going to eat well, but I am also going to kill you, for if I don’t kill you I will have no appetite, and he laughed.