by Mark Helprin
One of the men took off his hat, and gesturing toward the graves, looked downward as if in shame and said, “These are mass graves, ma’am.”
As if they had never existed she pulled her horse around, spurred it, and went out toward the road. The men remembered only that she had been high above them and that her expression had been hard.
The following morning, when they had buried more than a thousand men, the cook announced that his blackberry wine although sweet and young was ready to drink. It was very intoxicating. Jack had learned to distinguish the men he buried. Some he could see were killed by machine gun fire, some by shrapnel, some by disease. Some were officers, some had been dead a long time, some looked like people he knew, and some even looked like himself.
They drank wine because there was no breakfast, and they became extremely drunk. A dead soldier in blue and red was entrusted to Jack, who began to talk to him. He spoke to him as if he were alive, and as if the body were a drunken friend he carried him to a grave and dumped him in saying, “In you go.”
Digging was not so easy with the wine, but he worked hard, smashing his shovel fiercely and ineffectively at the ground by the field’s edge where there were rocks, since it had gone unplowed in peacetime. Every few minutes the cook came around with a huge bottle and poured wine into the men and the graves.
As they were covering the last grave, and reluctant to start another, they noticed that the white tents were folding. An endless line of ambulances came to take away the wounded. In less than an hour everyone from the other side of the field was gone. There was no smoke—no fires either. The gravediggers were astonished. They did not fear that the enemy would close in, because they had heard that he had been defeated. They had won.
In their drunkenness they could think of nothing to do but pat down the earth of the twelve raised mounds in the small field. They packed it down with their feet after they had finished the last of the wine. They went back and forth over the clay until clouds of dust arose in the sun, which had sunk low and become all red. The wine was gone, and so were the nurses; the graves were packed down. Some soldiers went to bathe in the river and wash their clothes. Some, like Jack, went to different parts of the field, where in the smoky red evening of what had been a clear yellow day they threw themselves down on the grass and awakened much later to see no fires, no lanterns, but only the high indifferent stars.
WILLIS AVENUE
IF, WHEN I am drunk or sentimental or prodded by a stupid friend, I think back to the women I have really loved, most of them are covered and hidden by wishes and disappointment. But there is one of whom my memory is clear, and it is strange—she was so unimportant.
She was named Johanna, and I knew her for a summer when I worked in a typewriter-ribbon factory in the Bronx. It was very simple. She sat across from me on the production line all day long, and when either of us lifted our eyes we saw one another. Our job was to put the spools of ribbon in boxes—a very boring job—a job which left our hands automatic, and faces and eyes free so that we spent many days looking and talking. She was not such an attractive girl, and she knew it. These days I don’t like beautiful girls so much, any more. It makes them less able to cry and be sad, and I won’t have a girl who cannot cry and be sad.
Now Johanna had a big wide face, and big heavy limbs, although she was not fat by any means, just big. She was in fact bigger than me but she thought like a very delicate woman, and so she moved as if she were little. Although she was not in the least self-conscious about her body (I often saw her breasts as she leaned over to get more boxes and her open shirt came more open), she thought that perhaps she should be, and I could always tell that she was thinking to herself, I have to be more delicate about myself. But she could not be, and the exposure she suffered made her no less attractive to me.
I confess that at first this was not so. She was big and my image of women had been so ideal; I imagined them as princesses and perfectly clean. I thought that perhaps I might sleep with her, understanding that it would not lead to anything. Then I took pity on her for her clumsiness and the way she was impressed by me. I am externally slick, rather handsome, people say. She thought I was beyond her reach; I did too. I took her to lunch, and she blushed under the fan in the little restaurant. The heat of that summer was so intense that it made us both sweat in the shade. She was taken by me and I was therefore not very interested in her. After all she was not very pretty. And every day we sat for eight hours sweating, our legs sometimes touching, across from one another under the inky breeze of the big fan. She looked down so much not because she needed to see to put the spool into the box, but because she was shy, and think, I had told her everything, wanting to make her a sister. She was very unhappy when I told her of the women I thought about that summer. When I first mentioned Nina she looked so sad that I stopped, but later I went on, and I would speak to her of my girls, and I think she cried in the women’s dressing room. The other women avoided her and thought she was strange.
We had lunch together every day. All she did was keep still, and laugh with me, and smile when I spoke without thinking. She went home to her mother each afternoon; she spoke well, but she was just not pretty.
In the South Bronx one feels as though one is in the hotter part of Naples or the dull part of the Great Plains. Dirt falls from the air, and the heat, the heat, makes everything, even the iron, wet. And the heat changes people. The people I don’t like complain about the heat. Johanna, whom I saw every hour of every day, sitting next to a half-painted column in the skylight light of a hot dirty workroom, did not complain about the heat, but wiped her forehead with her hand now and then and seemed to me very much like myself. She seemed to be me when I was not worried about things, when I was quiet and watching, when I had fallen and could learn and feel, in the heat, the rising heat of that time. Johanna, white-faced and green-eyed, darting-eyed, hands full of ink, wiping her brow with her wrist and getting ink on her wide face anyway. Johanna in the South Bronx in a hot summer when I was stronger and when I thought I would succeed, sat across from me each day. And then I left, and she had to sit there in the same place, and when January came around she was there, accepting whoever sat across from her. I don’t think I would have her now, but if she could know that I loved her then more than anything, that I would have married her, loved her, if only I had not been so young, if only I had known myself. Johanna. When she wiped her brow with her wrist she got ink on her face anyway, and she was always smiling.
ELIZABETH RIDINOURE
WHEN NATHANIEL was eighteen and had no place to go he joined the Coast Guard. They sent him to Maine where he served aboard a small cutter in Casco Bay. From day to day his life accelerated in company with white spray from a heaving blue sea gracefully turned back upon itself by a steel cutter, white except for a diagonal red stripe sleeking the bow—the guns white, the rivets the decks the transom the rails and even the sound of the engines white. Nathaniel had been born in a time when everything was expected. Having finished with the greatest war, no one could imagine another so it was lids off in bringing up children. They were raised to seek pleasures and believe myths. When these children were young men they obscenely smashed what they had obscenely believed. They did not understand the time from which they had come, and having let blind men lead them they then turned to the halt to lead them away. Naturally they went nowhere, having been taught that only the best of men are leaders. A generation so well treated can be fit only for early death. They were born in war, and those born in war will die in war.
Nathaniel was different. It would be hard indeed to say just how much his cutter pleased him. He was on duty for weeks at a time. In winter the rough sea and generous fog made him silent and content, teaching him that life on earth and the earth itself must rest in darkness, quiet, and shrouds of mist. In winter he learned to navigate by sight and sound precisely, to do dangerous things. He took part in the rescue of a freighter which had run aground. The sailors were Portuguese and Afri
can and they looked with special terror at the numbing sea and with wonder at the blue-jacketed Americans whose quarter they had come upon. Standing like a harpooner at the bow of the motorized whaleboat Nathaniel had pulled the frightened wet men in, leaning down far into the air above the sea and lifting each man with a smile. “Hello,” he said to each one as he hoisted him up like a baby. The Portuguese and the Africans could not understand how their rescuers could live so happily with so much ice, and arrive on time in a white ship with a red stripe and excellent coffee, as well as radar and guitars. They listened to opera that night, coming on the short wave directly from Milan.
In summer he grew dark and stronger and kept his uniform cleaner for the sake of women on the yachts. Baby girls on the dock watched him coiling lines or painting and asked him questions like: “Why do they put fish in a can?” which he answered and entered in the ship’s log. He was good at his work and he loved his ship, the bay, the sea, all the coasts and sandy cliffs, and most importantly his life, which he had suspected since he was a child would end before he was full grown. This was his genuine belief. He was not about to make it happen, and he would even fight the death he serenely knew he was born into, but not wildly. Wild fighting is often good, but in some ages it is simply undignified. So he spent each year as if it were the last, each day in fact, and his powers of observation increased. He was savage when he watched the cliffs and the sea breaking upon them as if they were a face and the sea slapping it. He watched yachts leaning fast their lines and booms lapping and kissing and the water climactically spraying the decks only to rivel away off the wood. This was a good America. This he loved, the America of ships and its deserted sea coast. He thought that Americans did not any more go down to the sea, nor to their prairies, and he thought this as he watched broken light dimming on the waves. Americans did not go down to the sea, and he saw few of them on the empty moonlike bright beaches in winter when he loved to walk.
He had never questioned an early death. He knew that his life was very strong and intense, that his sadnesses were extremely still and revealing, that the life he had on the Maine coast and off it was good, and that death was no more than leaving the coast.
One summer when the harbor was so full of white yachts they seemed only the plumage of the jetties and wharves, the cutter Madison was making its way out to sea. It was high off the water and unlike the yachts it traveled with perfect direction. It was on business and it knew and was the guardian of the waters. It was a father to the little ships and it moved out to the high seas where they seldom went. Nathaniel was standing on the bridge watching the jetty pass when he noticed a woman at the end near the great bell. He stood atop the white wall of his ship and looked at her, and turned to her direction as he passed. He saw her whitened face with only touches of a red glow from the new day, her suede coat with glittering square gold clasps, her deep violet stockings the artful pattern of which he could see even on the glaring bridge and which seemed to him the color of wallpaper in a very elegant house in Philadelphia. He wanted to tell her that, and he did when he found her two weeks later. She had watched his ship beaming away from her at three quarter face out to sea, halyards stretched musically, fittings aligned as if on compass course. His whole world fought eastward and rolled from side to side. Military ships move fast and appear to rush away. At that moment they entered into a compact.
The town was small; he found her easily. She was a lady, she was alone, and she wore a blue and white dress of lace with tight cylindrical sleeves and blooming cuffs. And her hair was the color of whitened gold. Whether by time, because of her great beauty, or by chance, this woman had found just the right way to dress. They walked down a dirt road between two fields of white grass and they exchanged information, although it seemed not important. “How old are you?” she said.
“Twenty, just.”
“I am thirty-four, just.”
She was married to a lawyer who was going to run for Congress, and she had finished Radcliffe when he, Nathaniel, was eight. But all this was by no means an appraisal or reappraisal, for their minds had been made up the day he saw her as he left for the sea. They talked as if they were engaged in lastminute instructions, hurriedly and without feeling or emphasis, as when stewardesses put on life jackets and pretend to blow them up.
She stopped and looked up at him. Her face was the color of white winter sunshine. It was peaceful, as peaceful or more so than what Nathaniel had learned was the peace of climate and the quiet of a warm day in March when the ponds are thawing and quite glistening. This woman’s face was glistening. “I,” she said, “should be very upset if I never see you again. If you go away now you will die, whenever you do, and I will die eventually and this meeting, about which I am otherwise very, very upset, will remain suspended here forever for no one ever to know, and I will have let my love spin and not engaged it. If love is the purest thing, and if I love, why then should I not love?”
The answer was not as clear as the imperative, and because they feared that they would never part he found a way. “I must be back at the ship at four. The whistle will blow and it will be heard on every part of the island. I know a barn with apple trees surrounding it. It overlooks the sea and the apples will be good by this time. We can go there, and sit, and do nothing. And when the whistle blows I will look at you, and rise, and run to the ship.”
They had apples for lunch and watched the sea. He remembered how she held the apples away from her so the juice would not stain her dress. He remembered how she sat, one leg upon the other. He remembered every detail of this woman, every small feature, every gesture, every move, breath, blink, silence, and sigh. She and her husband were not born in war, and they would live to be old. He would go to Vietnam, and not come back. She smelled fresh and delicious, and when she spoke she paused often and at just the right places to watch his face. He watched her for four hours. He never once touched her. They did not say much, only little things, about the tide, the sun, how hot it was. She was having her youngest day, he his oldest. When they realized they had been simply watching one another for hours they laughed. She had never looked into a man’s face for hours. He had never looked into a woman’s face at all, at least not in that way. When she had looked into her husband’s face, or before that at the faces of men she loved, it had been only momentary. Now she was looking into the eyes of a boy, a stranger, as if they were in another world where men and women lived in dreams and stared themselves into liquefaction.
And a few minutes after four o’clock the steam whistle of the cutter thundered off the sand cliffs and echoed through all the cow meadows and wheatfields of the island. They stood, she sunburnt, lighted, and dizzy, yet calm. Then he left and ran through a field of hay and nettles onto the road.
He was very young when he died but he had been expecting it. He left her in that place, that island on the Maine coast, never to see her again. She grew to be very old. Her life was long, and even when old she was a comely and then a handsome woman. People wondered why, but she would never tell them. She died with the secret with which her younger man had died years before. Early one spring she heard a steam claxon beating like the wings of a bird over the island, and she saw a young man asking her name (she paused to think of the beauty she had been, how full of the sun, how blond, how strong, how womanly and alive) and, as he was leaving and had turned to run down the hill, she called out over the waves battering the shore, in the sun of long ago, Elizabeth Ridinoure.
THE SILVER BRACELET
THE WAR was not even ended and many more were still to die when she had come over barley and gold plains to Beverley Station Saskatchewan and the English Benevolent Orphanage. She had had a big tag on her with routing instructions, and had been a long-distance Canadian Pacific passenger, traveling from Toronto into country she had not ever heard of or even imagined, since she was Dutch and only five years old. But even as a child she sensed the health and cleanliness of the plains, the pleasant heat, strong winds, and yellow sunsh
ining days. There, was no war. It was untouched, quiet, thick, hot, and growing.
And the wonder had never passed, not in years of looking down a narrow heat-soaked road disappearing into a sea of golden wheat, of a vast windy blue sky with distant crows arched like eyebrows, of emptiness and ocean-like expanse laden with the richest, most intense summer colors. It was to her quite a miracle, a child of the waves come to land, the turmoil turned to quiet, chaos become the agitation of bees above the wheat. A childhood of cellars, attics, and sewers was thrust into the open height of the universe. This great difference, coming unknowing suddenly from the gray to blue and gold, had made her silent and grateful, had stunned her.
Since she had only confused memories of her life, with strong currents of vividness—of her parents, of when her father went out and did not return but was hunted down like an animal away from its burrow—she felt almost as if she had passed into another dimension, or had been moved in time. Even her clothes, because they were so torn and foul, had been taken away by the liberating troops. But they were of cloth her mother had sewed, and when a kindly foreign giant innocently threw them out after putting her into a brand-new pinafore, she felt again the way it was when her parents became lost to her.
Her father had been a jeweler, and from some silver cutlery he found in the warehouse, he made her a bracelet. “Anneka,” he said, “this you put on your arm, up here,” sliding it up her little arm, “and as you get bigger you put it down more and more until it comes to your wrist. And then you will know you are going to be a woman and are grown up, because you will not get bigger any more. I know this from many years of making bracelets for little girls.” He smiled, expecting that as in days before she would be happy—but children know, and she looked at him with a killing silence which in other circumstances would have been thickness but which was for then a too, too fine intelligence.