Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  The agony and greatness of this was brought up sharp by a sudden blast. The master of the house had taken out his shotgun, and, while loading, had fired prematurely and blown a hole through the roof of the porch. He trembled, unable to comprehend the presence of Sherpas and Gurkhas in skins, the whips, the bloody mounts, the goatskin, the large elegant mustaches, the flashing eyes. Battle over, Al still clutched the goatskin. Nat addressed the man with the shotgun. “Excuse us,” he said. “We apologize for the disturbance, but we have hurt no one. My father, His Most Illustrious Majesty Sawatni Patna, is fond of saying, ‘Everything that rises must converge.’ We are sorry to have converged on your private grounds, but perhaps you should strengthen your hedge, and besides, we have diplomatic immunity.”

  Al threw the goatskin onto the porch, and the band of fierce horsemen turned about and raced for the darkness and rain as if they were heading for a camp on the wet silver slopes of the Hindu Kush. They thundered back across the fields, faces red, wounds stinging, the wind whistling through jackets and saddlery.

  5

  OBJECT LESSONS abounded in Cambridge, though they were mainly examples of what not to be. There was, for instance, the bread. On the bakery shelf of Sweet Tobin’s emporium was a sign which said: BAKED FRESH DAILY, THESE LOAVES CONTAIN ONLY FLOUR, WATER, SALT, AND YEAST. NO TWO ARE THE SAME. Marshall could see that they were clearly irregular: they were not the same, and yet he could not tell one from another. So with the many people who pridefully cultivated their differences without being different at all—people who wore bells and shaved their heads, who dyed their eyebrows pink and filed their teeth into circlets and moons, who dressed in skins, wore powdered wigs, went nude, tied logs to their backs, crawled on all fours, wrapped themselves in black satin, carried monkeys, walked ocelots, and put bones in their noses (and there really were people like this in Cambridge, so many, in fact, that it challenged the sanity of many students—and won). These people changed their identities with fashion, and the fashion at the time was to be revolutionary. Marshall was not that.

  He was not against change if it were to perfect rather than replace. One might argue that, had the inventors of engines merely continued the development of steam power, there would be no internal combustion, rocketry, etc., etc. “Imagine though,” Professor Berry had said on one of his diversions, “a steam engine of the year Two Thousand, having been perfected for more than two centuries with utilization of new metals, materials, and the recent discoveries of pure science. It would be like a shining jewel, as efficient as the geometry of a crystal, something so pleasant to behold and operate that it could in itself be an entertainment, sparkling and miniature, silent and clean, and such an old friend.

  “What I am talking about,” he had continued, the shafts of dusty light a vital invasion of the wood-dark room, “is the difference between serenity and noise, between deep colors and none at all. If the English had settled in the Arctic for the sake of ‘forward movement,’ or to satisfy a conceptual model, they certainly would have been mad. Common sense made them reject this prospect. They took the good fertile lands. This is the difference between exploration and revolution, and I would have you keep it in mind. Exploration rejects in a process as homely as a living man that which is lacking in graces and which is unconnected to the scarlet thread of history. Revolution lies amid the cold rocks and cuts the thread. Exploration proceeds along lines of beauty. Revolution is a knife which severs them. And besides, most revolutionaries from good universities become effete, epicene, whining, hermaphroditic muffins, fit only to write for the New York Review of Books.”

  Witness to countless riots and demonstrations, aware that in political organizations machinelike psychopaths emerged as leaders, Marshall became (among other things) an anti-revolutionary. He saw that power casts a sterile seed. He took as models men like Professor Berry and Ariosto Ben Haifa, his professor of Jewish history—dragonate and of genius, and often quite nasty, as geniuses and dragons tend to be. Jean Jacques Lumineuse, his tutor in English, was a better example than any of the vaunted revolutionaries—despite the wonder that he had written a 600-page Ph.D. thesis entitled “Landscaped Walks and Cracked Shell Drives in Seventeenth Century Rhapsodic Epitaphs,” and was at work on his first major tome, “Miltons Depiction of Insects.” Then there was Boccaccio Bancamuli, with whom Marshall studied Dante for three solid years—a man who had in one fat gesticulating finger more skill and knowledge than Marx, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg combined. Even Bancamuli's nervous assistant, Fango Della Mente, was a tower of virtue, though he did little but long for his fiancee entrapped forever in a minute Sicilian hill town called Centro Biftecca. The list was long, the backbone of Harvard, men who had risen not by politics or conspiracy but by their unadorned brilliance.

  Marshall’s years at Harvard were not weighted unfairly to action. He often lost himself in the perfect mechanizations of old art and new science reaching out with fingers and hand to feel what the ancient heart had known long before. This convergence was satisfying—to see science flesh unknowing the path of literature as sure and steady proofs rolled in, to see in the infinite lens of a university of minds a deeply moving orchestration of history and its meaning, and the revival in imagination and toil of times almost forgotten—not to accomplish an end, but to keep free a path for grace. All things tied into one flow, as the Florentine had known—the insistent forward metronome, the light tan coat of a hart in miniature or in glowing glass, the reverberating infinite spectra of Whistler oils within the Union chamber, the heart-snapping ruby lasers pulsing at near full purity, wooden oars rhythmic in the river bay, the wavelike motion of a girl upon her bicycle, the symmetry of the Common and its long lines of trees in ballet, the thunder of trains across bridges across planes of hard white ice across cold black water, or a leaf sadly uncoloring as autumn passed. The images flooded and burst upon Marshall and he saw that they were set within a matrix perfect and unfailingly vigorous. To see each day a hundred thousand views as bright and touching as fine painting and not be blinded or collapsed took much stamina. Art and intellect were the construction upon which the weight was held, though its strength came not from classrooms, concert halls, or the many great libraries, but from physical courage, and imagination of physical courage. Under attack, neglected, placed aside as if it were not a virtue but a vice, it was a balance for the unceasing flood of images.

  These taxed him physically. He exercised and learned to accept pain and seizures so that he could continue reception. Like all good things, they came hard, and often seemed overwhelming. Then, his eyes would flash in remembrance of sharp struggles, hunting, combat, and that which had driven men outward beyond their last breaths, beyond their little strengths, chasing upward fueled by spirit. That was one lesson, there were a thousand others, and most drew some blood in one way or another.

  Marshall reached the fall of his senior year not realizing that he would leave before he had planned, that in the spring he would not be dressed in a blazer and white pants, squash racquet in hand, thinking about his thesis and graduate schools. Instead, by March he would each day stand knee-deep in a pit of blood, a weapon in his hand, his breath condensing in the cold air of a place full of deathly screams.

  6

  AUTUMN LASTED only a week. It was summer until the twenty-second of October and winter by the twenty-ninth. Marshall remembered a class in between. As was his custom, he sat near the door—last in, first out. He spent the entire hour looking at a gold doorknob in which the cream-colored floorboards stretched in wondrous perspective to the same vanishing point as a green blackboard (the latter being one of the major paradoxes of education). The lecturer was very tall, and looked even taller in the golden convex mirror—he was easy to track as he bobbed up and down in the white fluorescent light. Outside, summer was dead and fall was dying, autumn—with its leaden light and clean air, its shades and cool afternoons, no insects buzzing, the dead grasses as crisp as cereal. The professor in the doorknob was an historia
n of diplomacy, the pride of a famous family, Dudley Waldwin Buce III. In his office he kept long fire matches, one of which a visiting student was obliged to strike and hold level while completing his requests or (in the case of radicals) demands before his fingers were burned. Marshall did the obvious—coated his fingers with liquefied asbestos—and spoke at leisure.

  Then it was winter. Suddenly it had become white, muffled, frozen. People went from street to street on packed ice and snow. Plow trucks jingled their chains and dark fell early. It was so cold and still that he sometimes expected to see horse-drawn sleds racing down Mt. Auburn Street, and a profusion of many-colored scarves and caps made the whole town resemble the bottom of a Christmas tree. But inside the gymnasium the pool sparkled like a lagoon in the Marianas. It was in a several-hundred-foot blue hall, high enough to keep echoes, banked with spectators’ galleries under arched windows. Marshall swam a mile each day. Young men and women in the lightest tank suits churned the water into rapids. They did laps, spun from the high board, flew on the trampoline, worked exercise machines in the mezzanine. There was so much activity that it looked like an ant farm. Divers in silver bathing suits seized Marshall’s eye as they whirled into light stars over the water. They revolved like hovering discs and they went off the board one after another as if they were orbiting planets. Under the tutelage of a diving coach with a crimson hat and a whistle, they had become disembodied spirits.

  Marshall and Al spent most of their spare time poring through travel books, airline calendars, and atlases. They yearned for the Pacific, for New Zealand, China, Japan, even California. Though it lay 3,000 miles across a whitened winter continent, they thought they could make it, and sometimes found themselves walking west over the frozen river.

  They faced a particularly bad exam in January. Their Arabic professor, a chocolate-colored Egyptian who could not say j’s (for example, he said “virgin” instead of “version”: “Do you know that virgin?”), had gotten overstimulated and required them to memorize a fifty-page economic speech by Habib Bourguiba. They spent days and weeks clucking to one another in Arabic. At dinner they rattled off an hour or two of the text and stayed up far into the night driving it into their heads. They hadn’t time for other work. They had become obsessed, neglecting to shave, shower, or sleep. Then one midnight in January, it left them. They had worked up to page forty-five, but found that they could not recall even one word. They couldn’t remember how to say basic Arabic sentences such as, “The President of the United Arab Republic studied the matter,” and they realized that their other courses had been sadly neglected. They felt pilloried, exhausted, and relieved. “We blew our fuses,” said Al, glassy-eyed. He was very tired, tired enough to look like Van Goghs painting of boots.

  “There’s only one thing left,” said Marshall. “Australia.”

  “No turning back.”

  They dressed in good mountain climbing boots, heavy twill pants, and down-filled canvas parkas. They loaded light rucksacks with jerked beef, chocolate, and dried fruits. They took essential documents, fifty dollars apiece, a compass, lethal knives, and paradise cookies (the kind with a chocolate bar on top). In a blizzard at one o’clock in the morning, they walked to the freight yards.

  A train came trundling along, shaking the ground. They ran and caught hold of a ladder. Once on top, they lay flat across the roof for fear of being killed by unseen bridges and signal structures. Snow flew into their faces and the acceleration of the hundred-car freight meant that there was indeed no turning back. The train was moving fast enough to convince them that it was not headed for a local siding. They began to freeze, and risked a blow from an unseen bridge to walk the catwalks in the blinding snow and try and find an unlocked hatch. Twenty cars and twenty jumps later they found one and let themselves down. The car was only half loaded, and though cold it sheltered them from the wind. Striking a match, they made out the nature of the cargo—chess sets from Luxembourg destined for Los Angeles. In the darkness they felt afraid, but could only wait for light and the new landscape they would see upon emerging from the hatch.

  They sensed from the roar that they were going much faster than they had ever gone on a freight. They could hear alleged thousands of kings, queens, bishops, knights, rooks, and pawns vibrating against their boards, as if they too were shivering. As they passed through the Berkshires and New York it must have been near zero. They exercised to keep warm, and consumed a portion of their supplies. Dawn struck and lit the car faintly gray. They climbed to the hatch and stuck their heads into the bitter cold. As far as they could see were snow-covered fields and rolling hills. Not a farmhouse or a fence intruded. On both sides of the train, fields stretched white like an enameled clasp, the horizon of blank cloud like mountains of snow. The only black was a thin trail of diesel smoke from the engine. Apart from that, the air was fresh, and smelled a little like apples. For the first time that year they looked at the landscape just as it was, empty of human works except for their train, quiet and cold, fleeceless and melancholy, but giving of strength. To see it open in front of them as they crossed it, to see the banded light changing in the distance as clouds swept by in high winds, to feel the untouched air as if on a winter sea, gave satisfaction and enjoyment higher than a world of degrees.

  Then they descended, broke into a carton, and played chess until, in half delirium, they imagined that they were the pieces. The train kept its speed; the fields were endless, and Marshall and Al were so cold that for two days they thought they would freeze to death. They were going too fast to jump off, and they imagined Charybdian monsters in the engine and caboose. Several nights out, having exhausted all rations, they lay miserable and groaning on the boxes, bunched up in fetal positions, looking like two kidney beans or a pair of boxing gloves. Marshall remembered one summer in Eagle Bay, when he went into the hills and found a lake surrounded by willows. There, he lay in the hot August sun imagining light wood boats sweeping past. The sun was surely marvelous, moving inside itself like a harpsichord or a heart, and he had slept cradled in its heat.

  Shivering and numb, he was grateful for the shattering cold. For it was part of the same wave in time by which he had come once, and would come again, to a lake in August.

  VII. A MEMORY OF THE PLAINS

  1

  BY THE fifth day they did not even know their own names. Just able to reach the hatch, they looked past the rails to an open sea of snow. These were the plains over which Marshall had ridden with Lydia from the Rockies to Chicago, through an endless wealth of wheat which shone at them fierce and dazzling. The train had rocked back and forth sharply from day to night. As much as he had fallen in love with her, sunburnt and green-eyed, he and she had also fallen in love with the land. He remembered what he had seen through the window glass a little dark and thunder-colored. Combines spun wheels and paddles in a steady swaying dance. The sun was high and they looked to infinity. They felt as if they could reach out and touch the states, as if Kentucky and the Dakotas were forever, and as if they had been once before and would again be alive, passing through limitless rich cycles. Marshall remembered that summer as quieter than a night without wind or crickets, a time that he knew to be hot and slow. Even failure and death appeared beautiful in the end—so intense and quick-focused was his vision of their form. He was someone’s son, and she was someone’s daughter. They felt small and inconsequential, but the outside had rolled into them.

  Though they had parted as children and twelve years had passed, he shuddered in memory of her. He loved her achingly even in the midst of his ability and independence, and he felt passion for just the thought of Union Station and its vaulted ceilings where birds swooped in the light.

  “You know,” said Al in a daze of hunger and cold, “when you see this, you realize that despite all the crap that goes on in the cities, despite all the words and accusations, the country has balance and momentum. The whole thing is symmetrical and beautiful; it works. The cities are like bulbs on a Christmas tree. They m
ay bum, swell, and shatter, but the green stays green. Look at it,” he said, eyes fixed on the horizon, not unmoved by the motion of the train. “Look at it. It’s alive.”

  “Do you think this train will go all the way to Los Angeles without stopping?” asked Marshall.

  “I don’t know. I can’t see how it could go three thousand miles without changing engines or refueling.”

  “We must be west of the Mississippi. That’s fifteen hundred miles and we haven’t stopped yet.”

  “Maybe we were asleep.”

  “Excellent,” said Marshall.

  “We can’t be sure. Do you think we should risk arrest, and get up to the engine?”

  “What engine. I want the caboose. It has the stoves, blankets, and stew ... I’ll spend a year in jail for that.”

  “You may have to.”

  “Look, the snow is at least three feet deep, and it’s just flat prairie here. We could jump when we see a town.”

  “When did you see a town?”

  “There has to be a town.”

  “There has to be a town. Show me a town.”