by Mark Helprin
1. A COAST OF PALMS
1
RIDING IN a new 1938 Ford through the March countryside of North Carolina, Paul Levy was astonished by the tranquillity and depth of the blue above. Every tree and field was sheathed in gentle, clear, warm light. Smoke from clearing fires rose straight and slow, and the speed and air were perfect as the car wound through the back roads, sounding like a perpetual chain of little firecrackers. He was sixteen, the son of a Norfolk ship provisioner, and in love with the Navy and its ships. His father saw them as delivery points for canned tomatoes and brass polish, but his father’s son was struck as if by lightning at the sight of one steaming up the roads, bent forward, pressing on—a squinting bridge, high black masts and angled guns, smoke, wake, urgency, and water pulsing off the bows. And when they turned, with claxons and bells, and the stern seeming to sweep like a skater over mottled ice, he saw in them the history for which his tranquil boyhood had been created. And in the North Carolina countryside, joyriding in his father’s car solo for the first time, he could not help glancing through the windows at the sky and thinking of the sea.
By darkness when he returned to Norfolk he had decided to join the Navy, which, after a year or so of arguments and heated wanderings in and out of the dance places at Virginia Beach, he did. At first he went to sea as almost a child, and the little experience he had he used badly, awkwardly, making more mistakes than he could count. But at nineteen he was an ensign in the Battle of fire the Atlantic. He used to come home every few months or weeks, and each time he was more solid, stronger, wiser. Being on the sea was miserable, especially in winter, and it wore him down. But it developed into his calling and during the war he had been off Africa, Normandy, and Japan. Because he learned fast and loved the sea he became a lieutenant-commander by the end of 1946, taking a year’s leave of absence to rest and prepare: he intended upon a career in the Navy, but did not want to be entirely brought up in it. He thought that a year of peace—maybe some farming, a trip across the country to San Francisco, a month at home—would do it. His father had become prosperous, especially since the fleet had not been decimated and would not be dismantled as had been the custom after other wars. They lived in a big house and it was planned that the younger sister and brother would go to college.
Paul, though, was lost to the Navy; he was an officer with Southern ways and a fighting man’s demeanor. They were proud of him, but having left early and against their wishes, he was not very much like them. He had forgotten his Jewishness, almost lost it in the rush and conviviality of war. No one knew he was a Jew if they didn’t know his name. Even when he said his name, everyone did not immediately know his origins, since he pronounced Levy like the tax, or the embankment which holds back a river. He was by appearance and dialect a Virginia or North Carolina farmer—and this delighted him. He was free as his father had never been to blend into the country and be whatever he wished, except for his name and except for his regret, as he saw his father growing older, that he as first son would do little in continuing what began to appear to him in the quiet spring days of his extended leave, riding again in the Carolinas, as a very important line of passage, a crucial tradition.
It took him a day to go from the balm of the internal Carolina lakes and bays to Washington Square. New York seemed to him like rows of gray teeth and he could not understand how people chose to live inside files of concrete boxes in a city which was really not a city but a machine. To him it seemed about the same as building a great engine, a thousand times greater than the Corliss Engine, and then living inside. London too had gray teeth, but in circles and en-flowered by trees and promenades. This city on the Hudson was like a sharks jaw—monotonous serrations thick and hard.
He had intended to seek out Jews, for the ones in Norfolk were in his eyes predictable and Virginianized. But to his great surprise, the Jews in New York would have nothing whatsoever to do with him. First, his approach was confused. He walked into restaurants and ordered familiar dishes. In this way he ate much and discovered that one does not retrieve receding history through gastronomy. He sat next to an old man and looked into his face, about to ask a momentous Jewish question, when the man said, “Go avay, cowboy.” He explained that his name was Paul Levy, but when the old man heard the way he spoke, he fled. Paul kept on trying.
He chose a synagogue and went to pray, but when he entered they looked at him as if he were a raccoon or a possum who had wandered in from the Louisiana Bayou. He went to see a rabbi, whose advice consisted of coldly instructing him to purify his pots and pans by boiling water in them and dropping in a hot brick. “A hot brick?” asked Paul in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You want me to boil water in my nonexistent pots and pans, and then drop in a hot brick? A hot brick! Rabbi, one of us is nuts, and its not me.”
After a week or more of seeking out Jews in New York he found himself at the house of a Roman Catholic law professor, lying on the floor of the library, which looked out on a cold Washington Square where snow was falling for the last time that spring, and next to the sooty buildings it telescoped itself into a salt-and-pepper image like the tweeds in the livingroom downstairs at the party. But the snow was twisting in cold whirlwinds like the warm viscous air above the fire. He was roundly, rotatingly drunk, davening in his drunkenness before the fire, and next to him was a Palestinian Jewess whom he had beguiled upstairs to kiss; but she wasn’t drunk at all. She liked him though and had never heard a Jew who talked as he did. When he told her he was a Navy captain (he blushed at the lie) she leaned over on the Persian rug and kissed him on his mouth in such a wet sexual way and with such great affection that he said, “Would you believe that I’m really an admiral?”
“No, I don’t believe you,” she answered. “But I want you to tell me about that you are a captain.”
And he did, starting with his revelation in Carolina about the Navy and the sea, his love for the sea, how in the war he had fought and endured, how his father had not known him but had seen instead a tough stranger who did pushups and could fight, and how for him being a Jew was impossible since he could not get either in or out and seemed to be hanging in between worlds which would not have him.
They stayed together for two weeks until she took him in a turtle-backed taxi to Idlewild and saw him off on his way to becoming a captain, as he had said he was. He felt that he did not know his own mind. He was apprehensive about not returning in time to resume his commission, apprehensive about leaving the silent city which he had come to like and respect, apprehensive about rising above shafts of sunlight and clouds on a straining airplane past the rows of gray buildings in new prosperity—a good quiet place for infants after the war—apprehensive of rising into an empyrean of blue, apprehensive of heading east, apprehensive of challenging the British cordon with an old coastal freighter, and apprehensive of the dreamlike frame of mind into which he had fallen. He hardly knew what had happened, but he felt as if he were certainly rising upward.
2
HE WAS lanky and well over six feet tall, with short blond hair and the remnants of a suntan he had picked up on the Albemarle. He was dressed in khaki pants, a white shirt, and a brown aviator jacket which he slung over his shoulder. Though only twenty-six, he had spent all his adult life in war. Darkness, danger, and combat did not bother him. It was a hot day in Brindisi. Children with nearly shaved heads and black shorts settled on the sea walls like rows of vultures. Heat was rising from the beige-colored stones, and prostitutes strolling under the palms were eyed by midget Italian sailors of the Adriatic Squadron. In the harbor, garbage scows and miscellaneous unkempt craft scuttled back and forth between ships, halting now and then to nestle against a cruiser or a minesweeper, not quite in the manner of a calf leaning on its mother but rather like the flies which settled on carcasses in the horse butcheries. Motors hummed and a brass band from one of the ships was practicing far in the distance, modulated by the waves of heat.
Levy had arrived at a pier in the old port, and
there he stood staring at the Motor Vessel Lindos Transit, an appalling piece of junk by any standard, more like a bombed-out house than a ship. But if it could float and go, it would do. Air upwelling about him, he was immobilized in wonder, and a group of people on the main deck returned his gaze. There was a woman who looked Bulgarian, perhaps a washerwoman, in a print dress. Above her head and a little to the right was a dark man in a felt hat, a Polish or Czech army officer. Next to him was another thick-armed giant of a woman, with gray streaks in her hair, a face of granite, and a little child near her. The child had a tiny Japanese-like face with eyes as round and small as ladybugs. In her hair was a bright white ribbon which shone against the darkness and was in the shape of a perching bird. Next to her was another stout woman, with a worried expression—and the face of an Italian condottiere in a High Renaissance painting. Above her, leaning forward to look at the American, was a thin and handsome man whose arms were very strong. Levy could see this because the man had grasped one of the many ill-placed rails and pipes which ran overhead, and was suspended like an acrobat. There was a girl of about twenty-five, a pretty girl with black curls which were blowing in the hot breeze. Above her, more like a monkey than an acrobat, was a boy in an almost Alpine jacket and a flat cap. He was scared and bewildered, as if he had just come from a pre-war French childrens book. He was, of course, an orphan.
Then there was a man who could only have been a waiter in a fashionable Budapest cafe or, and this is said without levity, a professional movie usher in Strasbourg. In the background were other eyes and half-hidden faces, old suits and hats. Levy felt very little, if anything, for these people and noticed mainly that the girl played with the rail and was the only one who did not return his stare. They watched quietly from the dark shade, as he stood in bright sun.
Some men were offloading coils of rope, barrels of solvents, and hundreds of iron poles with auger ends. Levy took possession, ordering them to return the material to the ship. They looked up in disbelief and weariness, for they had been working all morning. Furthermore, they had been ordered around too much by Teutons and Anglo-Saxons, so they each spit on the ground and went back to their tasks. “Jesus,” said Levy, and ran up into the ship, where a man stopped him and then recognized him.
“You must be Pool Levy. I am Avigdor Avigdor.” From then on, Avigdor Avigdor became his right arm and he became Avigdor Avigdor’s left arm. No one would move unless told to do so by Avigdor, who knew nothing about ships. Levy became used to issuing orders and hearing them echo in half a dozen languages.
“The first thing you must realize,” said Levy to his assembled seconds in command, “is that on a ship like this we will need every kind of equipment, material, livestock, and provisioning that we can get aboard. Since our cargo is human and hence very light, we can carry anything we require (if we can get it) without reference to weight. I want you to find what you can—food, medical supplies, ropes, scrap metal, lumber, tools, welding apparatus, fire hoses, wicker furniture, dowels, cloth, wire, a record player, tires, anything.”
“What is wicker furniture?” Levy explained. “I can understand,” said Avigdor, his left fist clenched and his right hand open, “food, livestocks, ropes” (he looked quickly about the bridge and superstructure to indicate his ignorance of nautical affairs), “but what please may I ask are we to do with scrap metal, tires, and wicker furniture?”
“We’re going to make sure that we get these people to where they’re going.”
“But how with metal and tires and furniture?”
“How indeed?” said Levy, retreating to his cabin and leaving them speechless on the bridge. Though they had learned to call him Paul instead of Pool they resented his command and suspected that he was touched. Whereas they had expected him to stay on the bridge and turn the wheel, he quickly got to know every inch of the ship and went around telling everyone what to do. Most irritating for the more than three hundred passengers was that he made them move from where they had settled so that he could draw squares and rectangles on the deck plates in bright red paint. No one, he said, was allowed to stay or even walk there.
He noticed that the people, whether Poles, Germans, Czechs, Russians, or whatever, had a very peculiar mannerism. When he spoke to them they more often than not kept their lower lips between their teeth. He went to his cabin and stared into a round mirror set into a fake ship’s wheel. When he did what they did he resembled a chipmunk, or a hamster. Depending upon their facial structures they looked variously like chipmunks, hamsters, rabbits, raccoons, and even a bucktoothed puppy he had seen once in Tennessee when his father had taken him there to experience the place before Roosevelt covered it with water. They used this expression to show their bewilderment, anger, happiness, and hope—a long and difficult string of things which drove the lower lip into the path of the teeth.
The Germans had beaten them so badly because, at least in part, the Germans were so well organized. But the Germans had been beaten badly in their turn by the Americans, who were savage and rich. America was clean; everything worked; everyone was sensible and fair; they had in America methods of organization as incomprehensible to Europeans as alchemy or a dead oriental language. Therefore, when Paul Levy covered the decks in red geometry, they deferred, for evidently he had some sort of plan, and who would dare to contradict him? For several weeks trucks rolled up periodically, and at the end of May everything Paul had requested was stowed aboard the ship. This astonished him. Though he had asked mainly for junk, in Southern Italy even junk was then in short supply.
He had refused to tell his plan because of an elegant Italian in a white suit. Paul noticed that he came to sit every day near the foot of Virgil’s Column. Although this aristocrat was more than a quarter of a mile from the ship, lost in a sea of masts, spars, clotheslines, pigeons, vendors, and pedestrians on the steps and in the little piazza, Paul picked him out immediately in scanning with the ship’s telescope because it was easy to recognize the front page of the Times of London. He couldn’t be sure that the man was not simply reading an English newspaper and had no concern for the Lindos Transit, until he got up a head of steam and, as many ships in the harbor often did, vented it in a white cloud and a whistle which echoed off walls, buildings, and hillsides covered with hot brush and stones. The gentleman of the Times sat bolt upright and threw his paper down. Paul had his left hand on the whistle chain and his right supporting one end of the telescope. Each time he pulled the chain the man sat more upright and appeared more expectant and tense. Paul held off until his quarry picked up the downed paper and resumed reading. He called Avigdor to the telescope. “You see the man reading the Times of London?”
“How do you know it is the London Times?"
“The type face.”
“Oh, yes. I see.”
“Pull the chain and watch him come to life.” Avigdor pulled the chain, and later let everyone know that there was good reason to obey their strange captain.
3
ON THE second day of June the Lindos Transit was fully stocked with refugees, food, and a hold full of junk and tools. People had continued to straggle in until their number verged on the counterproductive. Anyway, the sound of the words “second day of June” sounded to Levy positive and energetic. He fired up his engines, called in the Italian pilot, cast off at the tide, and with a plume and a whistle he signaled the port that the Lindos Transit was about to sail. For the benefit of the gentleman in white he tapped out the Morse symbols for Palestine, since he had always believed that homage was due to British agents in hot places.
In bright afternoon the ship drew out of the harbor and into the Adriatic. The pilot descended, and Levy took his first real command. The wind was fabulously strong from the east, as it most often is in Brindisi port, and the waves came in hard against the bows. He passed the last salt-eroded fingers of white rock, and then they were in open sea, rolling and pitching, out of breath, suddenly so much smaller, suddenly so much colder.
He knew th
at everyone would be going below, and he had ordered coffee, chocolate, tea, and biscuits for them even though the extravagance was bound to hurt later and disrupt some of his careful projections. Two-page census forms in Russian, Yiddish, German, French, and English had been distributed among the passengers. Levy had said to Avigdor, “Put jokes on the form, any kind of jokes.” In the holds and corridors people were eating and laughing.
When well out to sea, the ship found its stride. Avigdor came to the bridge. “Now,” he said, “tell me what you plan to do with all this nonsense we have put.”
“We’re going to fight the British—not just resist, fight. In other words, if when we approach the cordon we are attacked by a British destroyer, we will sink it.”
“Ha! With wicker furniture?”
“Shields, Avigdor, shields and breastworks. Here, steer one-twenty-six. Keep it steady. If it starts to seesaw then lock it and wait, and make the adjustment little by little.” He gazed deep into the smooth globe of the compass. “It can be done, but to do it everyone will have to work day and night for three weeks. Can they?”
“I believe they can. I believe yes.”
Even as a child Levy had been obsessed with achieving the impossible. In geography class, of which he was by all measures the shining star, he often lost his position in a “bee,” or other such exercise, due to his dreaming. For example, he had wondered if it would be possible to eat Borneo. Could you even eat just one little village in Borneo? A half a village? A quarter? How about a house? The picture of his eighty-five-pound four-foot self gnawing at the beams of a Borneo house staggered him. Could he manage even to ingest his desk? He calculated that powdered and mixed with conventional food it would take six months. “What is the capital of North Dakota?” asked the teacher. Levy, as runt of the past, was open-mouthed. Sometimes smart children drift: away, but they always come back. The teacher abandoned him to an apparent dunce’s reverie. “April, what is the capital of North Dakota?”