by Mark Helprin
“Where did we come from?” she would ask.
“From the land of Israel,” he might answer, “but that was a long, long time ago. More recently, we came on a trek from the land of the Golden Horde.”
“What did we do there? Did we grow trees?”
“Certainly not. There are no trees in that place. I can’t imagine what we did. We must have been nomads or farmers of a sort, or maybe merchants. I do not even know what my grandfather was like, though of course there is that story. By the way, would you like to hear it, the story of Grandfather Shmuel the first (and last) Jewish Grand Master of the Sabre in Russia?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so.” This was always a favorite. He had told it a score or more times. She loved it and, until much older, she believed it. A long shriek of wind, and then sparkling silence like a snowflake was his signal to begin. '
“When Grandfather Shmuel was just a little boy, his father was walking through a field one winter day as the snow swept across it, and the thought occurred to him that though he was a Jew, the land and the seasons upon it did not recoil, and crops planted by him grew as well as any other crops, and at night he could see the clear sky above. This, the delightful prospect of a normal life, made him extremely happy. He would use the lesson of the land so that in some generations (he thought) his descendants could breathe easy. He grew so excited that he danced homeward across the fields: his wife thought he was crazy.
“Little Shmuel was playing by the fire when his father rushed in the door and grabbed the child, holding him high in the air. ‘You!’ he said, ‘are going to boarding school! There, you will learn to speak Russian like a Russian, to ride like a Cossack, and to shoot like a red-robed Grenadier!’
“Shmuel did not know what to say. He was only eight, rather plump, and he didn’t know very much because he had spent most of his life arranging tin soldiers on the warm slate hearth. The mother was about to intervene to save her child from the high responsibilities of being the first Jew ever to attend boarding school, but she saw him cock his head, stare into space, and receive into his eyes the glint of gray light reaching off the steppes. The little fellow had believed what his father had told him and, since he had been a totally blank slate until that very moment, he was set completely upon this mission—a lucky accident, because the only boarding school that would take Shmuel was the dread and infamous Ikrtsk District Military Academy.
“As Shmuel was swallowed into the spike-encrusted gates of the academy, he looked back to see his parents, barred from entry, standing outside on the road. They seemed so lonely—his mother in her fur hat and black cloth coat, his father beside her. Then the gate slammed shut and he was in another world. Did you know, Katrina, that the Ikrtsk cadets did not wear shirts or shoes even in the coldest winters?”
“No,” she said, so gently and sweetly that it awed her father.
“That they slept on bare planks, and worked fourteen hours a day?”
“No.”
“That they never spoke but only shouted, that they were hard as steel, and that they took baths in ice water?”
“No.”
“Well, they did, and for years Shmuel could not grow used to such a life.
“The primary subject at Ikrtsk was sabres, but Shmuel was not allowed even to touch one. Instead, his father bribed the teachers with oranges and apricots so that they would pass Shmuel through to his senior year. The headmaster knew, however, that he could not permit a Jew to graduate from Ikrtsk.
“The headmaster was puzzled. Shmuel had learned and survived all the tricks. Though puny, he was fast, and attempts to surprise him with sword and pistol always failed. Then the headmaster realized that he had only to arrange a sabre match between Shmuel and Lugo, the Captain of the Ikrtsk Cadets—a three-hundred-pound muscle, a stayback forty-five years of age who had never graduated because he could not learn to spell Novaya Zemlya.”
Katrina was delighted: she could easily spell Novaya Zemlya; in fact, she could spell anything.
“This was truly clever. Why? you may ask. I’ll tell you why. Because ... the best prisons are those that prisoners make for themselves. When they tried (outside of the rules) to get Grandfather Shmuel, he knew just what to do. But when the danger fell within the expectations of his daily life, it was another story.
“Shmuel began to feel helpless even in the face of these bovine vermin who were so stupid that, for example, they went running after the moon when it appeared to settle behind a small hill, hoping to capture it and sell it to the Czar.
“The match was scheduled for early June, when in the Ikrtsk District the color-laden landscape was wavy with heat and the fields were covered with roses. In contradiction of nature, the swamps around the academy were warm and brown and dotted with orchids.
“Normally, the sabre fighters were allowed armor.”
“What is armor?” asked Katrina.
“Armor is like the shell of a turtle, but people wear it. Do you understand?”
Katrina understood.
“However, Grandfather found himself in only his muslin shorts, with a heavy sabre in his hands. The headmaster said, And now the Jew Shmuel will fight our dear Lugo. But first, Shmuel will approach Lugo and bend on one knee to apologize for striking a Christian.’
“Lugo lay in all his armor, reclining upon the floor of the academy’s great hall, into which the summer morning light came streaming. Grandfather approached and asked for forgiveness. It took a minute for this to penetrate the many bony layers of Lugos bullet-shaped head, but when it finally got to wherever it was going, one of his eyes flared red and Grandfather could see a tiny circular flame, like a continuous breaker at the beach, winding around the eyeball. Finally, Lugo grunted assent. Grandfather had not learned the many hard lessons of those years for nothing, and although he could not extricate himself by an act of cleverness, he was still not ready to be consumed in such an unequal contest. After all, they had never before given him access to a sabre, and the one they had just presented to him did not even have a handguard.
“He began to feel great rage. He knew that if he did not do something soon, Lugo would cut him to pieces in the wink of an eye. He wanted to escape, but the ranks of cadets were tight around the rim of the hall. He had to upset their lines so that he could run through them. He began to scream and he lifted his sabre. With an echoing cry, he attacked Lugo, who had not had time either to get up or to put on his bullet-shaped helmet of Mongolian design. Grandfather growled like an animal and brought his sword down on the flat, banging Lugo’s head like a great gong. The sword broke, the ranks of cadets broke, and although Lugo was dazed he began to get very angry. This was obvious, because his teeth were clenched so hard that they started to break apart and fall out of his mouth.
“Shmuel found his rage dissipating in the face of tremendous fear. Not only was he standing barefoot and half naked with a broken sabre in front of a hog-muscled giant, but the rest of the cadets wanted to kill him. He ran out the door, every single Ikrtsk cadet in pursuit. Everyone knew that an Ikrtsk cadet could chase down a rabbit and, without the use of his hands, behead it with his teeth. Shmuel managed to reach an impenetrable swamp which, even so, he penetrated. He headed for the thickest muddiest bog and burrowed down into it like an anteater. His tracks quickly melted in the mud and thousands of red orchids obliterated his scent. He stayed for many days, not daring to move. From time to time he would see a flame-eyed cadet crisscrossing the forest, sniffing like a hound, crashing through the brush in great bounding arcs. They even tried to burn down the forest, but a rain came. After a few days they gave up and Shmuel made his way home. He never graduated, but then again neither did anyone else.
“His father wept and asked forgiveness. ‘What can I do, my son, to gain your blessing?’
“Shmuel thought for a while, remembering how helpless he had been standing there in his shorts. ‘Send me,’ he said, ‘to the Royal Danish Sabre Academy in Copenhagen.’ It was done.
“His father paid half his fortune for a very special curriculum. The instructors drove Shmuel day and night for five years. A team of physicians was in constant attendance supervising his exercise, making sure that he was brought to absolute limits but without damage to his system.
“From six in the morning until ten thirty he had sabre practice with three great masters. From ten thirty until twelve he practiced gymnastics and weightlifting. From twelve to six the various masters engaged him in duels without cease. As he had his dinner a librarian read him the latest sabre magazines. After dinner he did gymnastics and went swimming, and then he had intensive fighting practice against an ever-growing number of experts. At the end of five years he spent fourteen hours a day with the sabres, sometimes fighting a dozen great masters at once. At twenty-four years of age he fought twenty-four great masters for twenty-four hours. He had become the greatest sabre fighter in the world.
“His regimen had caused him to grow to almost seven feet in height. He had 325 pounds of solid, lithe muscle, five pounds of regular muscle, and seventy pounds of other things such as brain, organs, etc. He could jump three times his height, run faster than a horse, and see better than an eagle.
“One bright June day he stood at the edge of the orchid-filled swamp near the military academy. He wore the finest black Danish armor, and his sword had been a present from the king. Across his chest were shining gold medals and red ribbons. Rays of light seemed to emanate from his face and eyes. With easy steps he ran ten miles through the swamp intending to fight all five hundred cadets and take on Lugo unarmed. But when he came out at the clearing where once the academy had stood he found only burnt remains—charred wooden beams enwrapped in clinging vines, and waving grasses on the windy floor where once he had fought. Losing many of their number, the peasants had come by the tens of thousands and thrown themselves against the academy, finally destroying it and its students. Shmuel was left in his shining black armor. He had become a jewel in fighting, but he found himself standing in a gentle field, his enemies gone, and soft things about which he did not know beckoning from all around him.”
6
THAT WAS what Katrina Perlé’s father told her. Being a little girl in a little bed late at night she believed him, and it gave her great courage in imagination. She loved her father very much, and since he was absent among the trees most of the time, this was a precious link to him. “Daddy,” she would say, “tell me about Grandfather Shmuel.”
Even a great revolution did not obliterate the things in Russia which give exiles tremblings of the heart when they think back to a past over which the moon rode and into which violent winds poured with no check except the beleaguered sense of beauty that still lives on. Katrina’s father had been a landowner and manager of forests. Declassed immediately, he spent several years reliving his youth as a logger among the ever-present trees. Then he quickly rose and was made a manager of forests once again—perhaps because he had always been indifferent to politics, and even the most rabidly political could see no threat in him. He was convinced that whatever happened he was destined for the same profession, having been placed in it by accident of birth, his own skill, and then a Party committee. Luck restored the line and brought it from an altered course to its original path. His was a family of the forests and farms, and ever would be.
It had seemed to him at first that he might die in the timberland, for he feared partisans and antipartisans, and there was great strain amounting to small wars within the group of those taken from other professions and put into this, one of the hardest. Besides, he was not young, and after so long an absence the work was almost too much. He even dared say: “In its infinite wisdom, the Party cannot see that a man who has not been cutting trees all his life can easily die if he is old and put into the wilderness, and that a forester will surely die if removed to a watch factory or an office full of shuffling loose leaves. The beams for the tables in the offices will be crooked and slow in coming, and watches worn by the new foresters will not keep proper time. God may have been unjust, but at least He was intelligent.”
He spoke like this only to former priests and aristocrats, and with circumspection. Then as if by miracle came the minor restoration, and with the few amenities he could usurp he sacrificed a little sacrifice and began once again to enjoy his life on earth.
The daughter was born in a house with a slate roof, gables, and many chimneys. It went unpainted because of the paint shortage and was bare inside except for a few pieces of furniture. There had been more but the Perlés threw it out so as not to appear wealthy. Perlé may have been apolitical, but he was shrewd. The floors and walls were shining and spotless. They repaired every little crack and chip, and found their elegance in cleanliness, order, and rows and rows of small treelets which were always in residence waiting to emigrate out to fresh tracts of timberland. The treelets had small labels on them and were set in terra-cotta pots.
“We are desirous of increasing production, so we have utilized this excessive amount of living space as a greenhouse.” As functionaries and inspectors tripped over the trees they thought, in their functional inspectorial ways, how inconvenient and how correct. Let the man continue; he is an eager soul and wants to work for the people. So the daughter was born in a tiny forest, and her baby’s cries echoed over the little trees.
As total and terrible as times may have been for most, she was spared, as some are always spared, and in a remote district near the White Sea they lived subject to God and nature, unbending to revolution or any other creation of man—not because they were strong (for they were frail) but because they stood in the eye of the hurricane, correspondent with mildness and awe. Though they had been mainly sad and unsuccessful, not heroic in any way, not great lords or particularly wise, not so strong, not so beloved, from their obscurity they were moved by the beauty of the world, often touched and often electrified by natural storms and colors, and they formed in their way a silent aristocracy—neither empowered nor bold nor ever known. They were to be born and to die in a long unrecognized line only rarely favored by fortune. In this way they suffered and were not distinguished, but they had one special power. They understood the light.
Katrina grew. As a little girl she worried about strange things, about what would happen were the White Sea to splash into the Black, if there were clarinets in the very north of Norway, how it would strain the eyes to see everything at once. She imagined that in the summer the interior of Russia was gold and warm. Railroad tracks lashed down the earth, for in its great goldiness it might easily have floated up to heaven like a balloon. Time passed rapidly over a childhood she remembered to be as still and beautiful as an engraving. And, summer or winter, when the family walked in the town people stared at the father, the mother, and the daughter as small and beautiful as a perfect icon.
A great cathedral stood in the countryside a little to the west. It had been built a century before in exact imitation of Chartres, and would not last the war. During Katrina’s youth it had been converted into a grain warehouse and was taken care of by one of her father’s friends. They often went to visit; Katrina was allowed to play in the mountains of grain rising high from the vast floor. When she was older she often returned on her own, walking through fields and over hills to reach the enormous room where she sat alone in the deep colored rays from the windows. The different panels were like patchwork, or fields seen from the Alps. Standing on the grain, she thought how much better a knowledge had the builders of cathedrals than the builders of a state, that the idea of a state is like restraining wire which cuts into the living fullness of the world. Moving in that replica of Chartres, the purple and rose lights playing across her face and dress and hair, she thought that the world was more than the sum of its parts, but that if she knew those parts and loved strongly and well she would come to know the world. It was sensible and logical. Know the elements, order them with love, and thereby know the great matter of things. She was too young to know that adversity w
ould seek her out, and that she would struggle and fight, either to win, to lose, or to pass on the endeavor to the receptive innocence and awesome strength of a new generation from her descended. Thoughts of struggle were far from her mind.
But without warning she found herself mesmerized by the deep lights, unable to move, rigid, locked into the tiny waves pulsing from the glass. Her eyes were pulled up almost to the roof of their jurisdiction, and she felt the muscles of her face follow in pleasant numbness. A bolt of white surged through her, snapping her upper body like a whip, throwing her down on the grain, where she writhed in silence and amazement in the darkened cathedral. There she lay in painful intercourse with the spectrum, awakening finally to know that her life was not her own. She had gripped fistfuls of grain, and she cast them away from her as if to fight, but she was so exhausted that there was no fight left, or so she thought.
7
ONE NIGHT when it was raining and she lay in her bed listening to water on the tin and slate, she imagined Leningrad and its summer sky of cool whitened blue like the surface of a temperate sea. A powerful wind forced spray through the windowframe, and she fell asleep with the same rolling, easy sensation to which one abandons oneself in the clear night swell. She dreamed, but not of the sea.
She walked in the marketplace of a large city, where it was very hot and where the buildings and sky were of a similar heavy gray. Her breath was a mist and her eyes clouded with the thickness of July in the commercial backstreets. Pigeons washed in pools of dirty rainwater. A beggar said, “Give a carter a penny for a sledge.” Before her was a street of carts with things of all colors. A large van at the end of the street was unloading the carcasses of lambs, and they were piled high—pink like clay roof tiles after many years in the sun. A man emerged from near the lambs and immediately he and Katrina were in communication. They came together slowly and the din grew greater around them; the people shouted and merchants held their wares aloft; a group of men rolled barrels down the street; a man was feeding a fire; green Amazon parrots screamed from their perches. But they converged slowly, she like an angel gliding unseen through Jerusalem on a feast day. Her legs and arms were almost bare. She seemed to glide to him. They embraced and kissed in the shadow of the lambs, and her hat fell off her head and rolled away on the ground.