Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  Among the hundred guests at the wedding were dozens of admirals and the Secretary of the Navy. The rabbi had forgotten to bring the canopy, so they improvised. They used a damask tablecloth as lustrous as snow, two rifles from the honor guard, and a rake and pitchfork from the garden shed. Levy and Livingston held the rifles, and Rob and a young sailor held the pitchfork and rake, to make a tight canopy which glowed in the sharp morning sun.

  Marshall and Lydia stood before the admirals in the garden as the tents were buffeted by the wind. The rabbi said, “They, who in the face of their mortality and in the decadence of their times, who with hearts gentle and true profess their love for one another, today have our blessing. Lord keep them safe.” They smashed the glass. A jet climbed straight as an arrow against a blue and wistful horizon. They embraced, and champagne began once more to flow abundantly in the Levys’ garden. Battered gently by the music, couples danced. A young man wrote something on the brim of a girls hat. An officer held the collar of a womans dress and talked at her determinedly as she looked down. A woman in salmon-pink satin had one hand on the table, and the other stretched out holding a champagne glass. The clouds sailed by as sure as the regatta, and Marshall and Lydia were taken up and beyond their control, lost in the music. They turned ’round and ’round on the dance platform oblivious once again of the admirals and the noise. Then they stopped and put their heads together like horses in the field, only to feel a flood of tenderness and love, and their courage tolling about them like a brass bell.

  21

  A COLLECTION of canopied launches had accumulated by the Battery wall. Sailors in garrison belts rested on piles of Civil War shot, and were brought one barrage after another of wedding food and champagne. At nightfall, the last of the launches pulled away into the smooth water and warm air.

  The caterers folded their tents and retreated with the speed and finesse of the French Army. It took them no more than an hour to get everything in the trucks and restore house and garden to their original June splendor. Lydia and Marshall sat in the garden in familiar fashion—back to back. They seldom needed chairs, and were so expert at descent and ascent to and from this position that they operated in the smooth offhand way of acrobats. They looked in separate directions and thought independently, but returned to the same center, their backs warm and touching, and, sometimes, their hands entwined. It became almost an emblem for them, and they thought that if they were to have a coat of arms it would show Marshall and Lydia nonrampant, and a great symmetrical pine.

  She gazed at the full darkness of a blossomed tree, listening to its lush spaces. She was thinking about her new name, and it tumbled on her lips as her old name had often done. Lydia Levy had by law and decree become Lydia Pearl. She said them over and over again: “Lydia Levy, Lydia Levy, Lydia Pearl, Lydia Levy Pearl, Marshall Pearl, Marshall Levy, Lydia Levy Marshall Pearl, Marshall Levy Lydia Pearl.” She took yet another sip of champagne (they had decided to drink champagne all night), and the moon in the glass as flat as a quarter and as white as paint reminded her of her new name. It made the glass sparkle, she thought, like Lydia, and the moon was Pearl. There before her clear and reflecting was Lydia Pearl, and the confusion of names and refractions penetrated with her gaze into the softness of the tree, landing as if on a pillow.

  Marshall stared at the whitened bay. Leaning against Lydia, he entertained visions of himself as a lustrous fighting fish piercing the waves of the Atlantic. He saw from afar the shimmer of a curved and muscular salmon rising in combat over the waves, and at the same time he felt the leap and the foaming white water, as if his eye had been in the fish, and his skin were smooth and glowing. He pushed against a fast river and went upstream jumping falls and resting in backwaters only to start again, against the water, which had once carried him downward. All around, the sound of breaking waves came rolling at him, and in his mind’s eye he leaped another falls, flying in a great arc weightless and abstract.

  Then Levy came silently down the path and invited them to his study. “It’s a quiet night,” he said. “Do you think you can make it up the stairs?”

  In the airy room high above the bay, they sat in a triangular pattern—Levy at his desk, with a bunch of papers spread before him. Marshall felt momentarily perfect and fulfilled, and said, “You read it. So you do ... too much champagne I say.”

  “I’ll summarize, since they’re partly in German.”

  “That’s fine,” said Marshall, “I couldn’t read them in English.”

  Levy began, haltingly piecing them together, and then using them as the base for his own narrative. At first, Marshall’s and Lydia’s thoughts were elsewhere, but then they began to listen intently—if not soberly.

  “From ‘Report by Stabseinsatzfuhrer Anton, Lodz, 11 February, 1943’: ‘This last Wednesday Bureau 17 received a group of prisoners from the detention camp temporarily set up at the station. All were members of the Polish underground. Several Jews were among them ... two women and three men ... Zelewski, Carnovski, etc.... and Katrina Perlé, a Jewess speaking Russian as native tongue ... prisoners transferred ... Jews given over to custody of SS Obersturmbannführer Rauf.’

  “Strangely, here is an excerpt from the ‘Report of the Commander, Group C, Kamentz-Podolsk, 23 September, 1943’: ‘Executions have taken place in the following categories: political officials, active communists, thieves and saboteurs, Jews with false papers, NKVD agents, denouncers of ethnic Germans, revengeful and sadistic Jews, undesirable elements, partisans, members of Russian bands, insurgents caught with arms in hand, rebels, agitators, young vagrants, and Jews in general. Appended is a list of those considered most vile and dangerous. They are no more.’

  “Katrina Perlé is on this list, and on other lists, and it’s always the same. She is captured. She is reported executed. She turns up again. When I was in Europe in the summer of 1950, 1 thought to see if others on the list were alive. It took several months, but the Red Cross found a man who had been on the roster of dead.

  “He was in a hospital in Geneva, where I went to see him. His name was Metzner, and he was very sick. I was stupid, and I went in uniform. He didn’t trust me. I came the next day in civilian clothes; he just looked at me and shook his head. He told me a little, but not much. Perhaps he knew nothing more.

  “He said that he and Katrina Perlé had escaped, and that for the third or fourth time they had gone back with the partisans. They once came in contact with a dislocated band of the Red Army in Poland, far behind German lines.

  “He said that when they first collided face to face deep in the mountains, Katrina fell to her knees on the snow, in amazement, and a tall Russian carrying arms and bandoliers of ammunition rushed to her through the mist and darkness. Evidently they had been in love before the war, and it seemed a miracle that both should be alive in the midst of winter, in a forest of high trees, behind the retreating Wehrmacht.

  “I have his words here, as I took them down: ‘On the first beautiful day, they were married. We had very little food and most of us were sick, but we paused for half an hour and the leader at that time, who later was killed, married them. They cut down some vines with berries and that is what they gave one another when they embraced. And they knelt in the snow as she had done when she had first seen him...’”

  “And what of my father?” asked Marshall, unexpectedly drawn into a past with which he felt nearly as much intimacy as with his present.

  “This is what I know of him, and this is all. His first name was Lev. He was from Leningrad. He was either an economist or an engineer, or both. He and Katrina Perlé said that after the war they would go to Jewish Palestine. He was tall, and Metzner said that his eyes were ‘piercing.’ That’s it.

  “But, Metzner is alive. He is a scientist. When I met him, I had no idea that he was anything other than a peasant. (He was a strange man.) In this folder I have a paper on glaciology, written by Hans Metzner. I know that it’s the same one because of the picture. Look at it.” Marshall saw
an old man with white hair. The paper had been delivered in London, and Metzner was listed as Professor of Geology at the University of Lausanne.

  Levy handed Marshall the dossier and headed for bed. Lydia could read German, and she and Marshall stayed up until the sun rose, going over the yellowed documents. In this way they spent their wedding night. Katrina Perlé and her husband had vanished from the memory of the world, and she had been cut down on a bright and beautiful day. Marshall and Lydia understood the rabbi’s words about “the face of their mortality.” They passed the night uncomfortable and upset. It was tense and sad, like the night of an assassination. The rabbi’s words came clear to them, especially when a placid morning arose from the sea by Charleston as they read over and over the words that Levy had taken from the man in the hospital: “And they knelt in the snow as she had done when she had first seen him...”

  VIII. THE SEA AND THE ALPS

  1

  THEY RODE in a boat-hulled helicopter with double-barreled jet engines and rotors that twitched like an insects wings in a hovering staccato wheel. Wind and engines were deafening as the military craft faced to sea and ran a hundred miles in search of the British Merchant Navy motor vessel Royal George, upon which Lydia and Marshall would sail to Rotterdam.

  A hurricane in the east raged undecided and alone over an empty patch of sea. Just west of the Gulf Stream, the Royal George steamed up and down waiting to see if clear passage would open and in which direction. They were short of crew when they put out of Norfolk with half a cargo of coal, and a man had been swept overboard in the gale. On his telex, Levy had received a full report, and offered to send a replacement for the voyage, to work passage. Thus Marshall was conscripted into the crew.

  Though she was the Admiral’s sister, Lydia had never ridden in a helicopter. Nor had Marshall, though he felt at times as if the noise of the rotors—like sudden rain beating on a tin roof—were entirely familiar. The helicopter crew had just returned from Vietnam, and were elated to be alive, frightened of themselves, and remarkably casual with their machine. Partly from habit, and partly for Lydia, the pilot guided his craft through cloud and rain as if he were a skier. He slid down a steep ramp of broken clouds and made a wide circle above the sea. He banked to nearly vertical and looked downward through the side window. He charged ahead and then veered into the soft ceiling. He put music on the communications system, and swayed the helicopter so that they felt as if they were inside a dancing elephant. Lydia loved this, and it showed in her face.

  The boys from Dallas and Tucumcari, in fatigues and lifejackets, stared at her without letup. In the gulf off Vietnam, and shuttling inland over dappled plains and muted gunfire, they had wished for such a woman. She put her hand on the gun carriage and looked over the sea, watching the waves drive northeast. She felt that she held the helicopter and its lethal weapons in her hand, that it emanated from her like spokes in the wheel of visual lines made by the airmen in her regard, that by will alone she could direct and co-ordinate its flight that in the slightest movement of her eye, she could turn it and make it sweep down. It did go where she willed, running smoothly over the sea, toying with the storm.

  The Dallas gunner cried out, “I have a ship at two o’clock.” They waited for a break in the clouds, and, as soon as they had locked in to a distant form tossing in the spirited sea, made for the ship. Dropping to twenty-five feet above the waves, they sped through mist and spray toward the high steel sides. The crew of the Royal George lined the bridge and forecastle, watching the helicopter approach over the water as if it would smash against the ship. The pilot increased speed and, only a few hundred feet from target, rose rapidly over the masts. Then he went over on his side and circled the Royal George for no reason other than to show that here were men on the sea and in the air, in steel machines knotted in the mane of a hurricane; that the engines were firing and hot; that they could go where they wanted; that in conjunction with the sudden winds and high waves, they were free.

  The dazzling blades came so close that they nearly struck the ship. Like that of a muscular bird, a thickened quail, the body of the craft was streamlined with plenty of curved limb. The sound of engines shuddered down the decks like the rain, and coursed over the upturned faces of the sailors as the Royal George yawed, pitched, and rolled. Great waves lifted its bows, lurching along the sides like a flood in a gorge, and men in blue and yellow oilskins rushed to the main hatch cover as the helicopter hovered amidships.

  The gunner threw aside nylon webbing at the door and swung out the winch, while the pilot followed precisely every sway of the ship, hand and eye usurping all his vital being. Marshall took the sling and pushed away. He was lowered into the rain, and a minute later he hit a slippery deck. Lydia followed, waving goodbye to Dallas and Tucumcari.

  As Lydia slowly descended, the men of the Royal George were astounded—they had not expected a woman. She slipped out of the harness and swept her hands through her hair. So off balance had she rendered the sailors that they looked like prehistoric Britons. Open-mouthed, squat-faced, cliff-eyed, they rocked silently on yellow and blue sea legs like a chorus line of idiots. The officers saw Lydia and adjusted their tunics. Then a wave came unexpectedly from starboard and hit the ship with a ferocious hook. Grasping rails and lines as water poured from the deck into the sea, they rushed inside.

  Marshall took Lydia’s hand to help her through the companionway. As they looked back they saw the helicopter making a steady line to Hatteras and Virginia, where the sun would break through. In a confusion of oilskins and a dozen English dialects they looked at one another and realized that they hardly knew who they were. Suddenly they had come into the middle of the sea in hurricane season. The helicopter which had carried them was just a spot, cleaving its way to the coast. As the ship pitched into the storm they were shown down a long narrow corridor to their cabin.

  They switched on a tiny light which did no more than accentuate the darkness, and they looked into their young faces dripping and windbeaten. Touching their cheeks together, they embraced in the glare, surrounded by shadow which agitated as if with gnats or smoke. They held one another and moved to stay standing while the ship rolled and the sea broke above them. Though dark, the cabin seemed to open like a flower into a picture of Western landscape, a fountain of colorful images. Marshall did not know if the Lydia he held were the graceful young woman with long perfect hands and silver rings, or the little girl in a gingham dress, in a starry Rocky Mountain meadow. He loved her.

  2

  THEY STARTED a tour of the ship in the engine room. The Royal George was brand-new and more automated than a Japanese toy. The engines were run by computers, and adjustments in speed, maintenance, and corrective repair were accomplished electromechanically. Several times a year in major ports an army of technicians boarded with packs of instruments for an overhaul. The regulars had nothing to do but stare at several stories of green enameled iron in the main well; and the catwalks might just as well have been for cats. However, the union was present, insisting that a complement of motormen remain in number sufficient to wipe and fire a sweating gargantuan sea engine of the type that had once swallowed whole the labor and attention of fifty men. Each watch of fifteen congregated inside a white glass-enclosed room suspended in the well, where the walls were filled with registers of lights. They were, to a man, old Scotsmen and Northerners, raised in steam. But they sat silently at consoles and read the Illustrated London News, while they listened to a recorded tattoo of bagpipes and reeds. They were old, white-haired, of deliberate gait and hard methodical breathing. Sunken eyes gazed before them with the expression of an animal brought from its den to a closed operating theater. It was as if they had been kidnapped from nineteenth-century ships. “Isn’t it strange,” said Lydia, when she and Marshall stepped off a ladder in a dim vibrating corridor, “that the future is always obvious when it first appears. That,” she said, meaning the banks of LED and the silent running of the control room they had just visited
, no less the passive men whose grace and skill had been prematurely cupped in brain and eye away from hand and body, “is the way it will be. So much intellect and so little else.” They were alone in the dark corridor, on their way to the bridge and the kitchens. “Hold me,” she said.

  He reached into her dress, and with his other hand he felt her back and shoulders while they kissed sadly and almost wildly. They might have gone on that way forever, so rough and alive did it make them feel, had it not been for the sudden appearance of a young rating, who, upon seeing the voluptuous entanglement, perked up to say, “My goodness, in the passageways yet. Well done.”

  Whereas the engine room was a leap into the future, the galleys were a throwback to the twelfth century. Long-haired kitchen boys were jammed into corners and below tables, peeling potatoes and shelling eggs. Tremendous pots, cauldrons on tripods, hanging perforated utensils, and wooden boards laden with chopped onions, garlic, and beef were scattered about a cold slippery room filled with jets of vapor from leaky steam valves at the base of the ovens. There were two cooks, Dave and Harvey. Dave was tall and skinny, and resembled a prehistoric bird. Harvey was dark and inexact, and looked like the head of the Guatemalan Secret Police.