Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  Patches of weed, sometimes miles in circumference, covered the sea. Often, the mats were so dense and piled that it was possible to walk across the top. Dave and Harvey guided the launch and moored it to an island of sargassum. Though they thought it was all “silly,” they did it for Lydia. She and Marshall jumped onto the dry crispy weed and ran across it as if on a giant mattress. The sun was hot, and as they ran they liberated perfume from sea berries crushed underfoot. Finally, at the base of a gray-green rill, out of sight of ship and launch, in the middle of deep ocean, they lay on the fragrant undulating mat and slept in the sunlight. After a few minutes they awakened filled with incredible desire and made love in the lee of the rill, in the open heart of nowhere.

  Heading back, they peered over the gunwales through impossibly clear water. Far below, strange animals proceeded with their daily intercourse. There were the Great Slick Eels—150 feet long, as thick as trees, as sinuous as whippers’ whips at carnivals, with heads larger than horses, and huge idiotic smiles. These Great Slick Eels hunted the foolish and fatuous Agrolian Fish—600 pounds, completely round, gaps in its front teeth, and scores of useless little legs. They saw the fabulous Shmata Ray, as lithe as linen in the wash, as colorful as a Third World flag, moving in the deep with short repulsive jerks. Then there was the Noiseless Laughing Dill, a huge columnar Coelacanth which Lydia swore was wearing opera glasses. Harvey and Dave thrust their heads into the salt water and observed with wonder the Honey Fish, the Water Bat, the Decapus, and the Optamoovulgian.

  Speechless from what they had seen, flushed and burnt from the sun, the crew hoisted up the boats and went to fetch their mattresses. Then they lay on top of the hold covers as afternoon turned into evening, when the stewards brought around sandwiches and bottles of tea. When darkness came they looked at its starred walls as the Christians must have done on the first night that they had driven the Moors from Granada. Then the Scottish cabinboys discovered that the fish were luminous and blinking, coiling in the waters like Broadway. The mats too were lighted by organic phosphorescence, and as night proceeded they grew brighter and brighter. When everyone was nearly asleep and only the Captain stood, staring from the bridge to the sky, they were awakened and energized by the rising moon, which danced self-contained on the horizon and twisted in distant sea vapor as hot as a flame in a cup.

  They were resting on a deluge of bioluminescence. Planetary groups lit the ship’s sides and were visible on the horizon for 360 degrees. Their pulsations and patterned telegraphy, as some slipped out of sight in the curve of a wave and then returned, were like the winking lights of a computer panel or the blackened mantle of a glittering city seen from the air. What shakings and awe must the first navigators have had when becalmed perhaps forever in the center of an infinite half-sphere, the sky and floor of which ticked clear celestial and diffuse animal light. The Royal George was surrounded by glassy glowing waves—an evening of silence for the assembled crew.

  Then they started from fright, for the Captain had arrived with the grace of a ghost, and stood tall in his white uniform amid the reclining men. Seldom did he move among them. Close to seventy, he had been an admiral of the Royal Navy, who, upon retirement, could not stand to part from the sea. When the water was as smooth as a mirror, pastel by day, rich and blue-hearted by night, he grew restless.

  “For those of you who would wonder,” he said, largely in pretext, “we are at the center of the sea, off the trade routes, where few have seen fit to travel. To the northwest is North America”—he pivoted and faced the various directions as he spoke, as accurately as a compass—“to the southwest, Brazil with its jutting northern chin, and then the Amazon and the white Andes; to the southeast, Africa, being worth three or four continents; to the northeast, Europe, the clockmade heart of a mechanical world. We are roped between the four, nearest the dry shelf of Spain.

  “Half a thousand years ago the Spaniards, as if sprung from seed, burst in virility upon the sea and passed this point in little ships to find and conquer a new world. Since that time we have been retracing and elaborating their routes, but have none of our own. Since that time we have become as immobile as whales upon the beach—fat, shoddy, recreant, dissolving. For there is only one condition in which a man’s soul and flesh become as lean and pure as his armor; in which he finds in the art of his language and the awe of his music, unification with his own mobile limbs; in which he can find entertainment so intense as to draw him without a twitch into complete abandonment of the things of the world; in which he gathers speed and rises to his natural task as if he were an eagle destined for flight or a porpoise propelled in arcs across the water.

  “Do you doubt me? Doubt not. I learned in Algeciras what this was, as I looked upon the Spanish walls which are not walls, as the lines of earth and sea were solid in one piece inviting passage, as the poverty appeared infinitely rich. I learned in the blink of an eye. I learned as the thin slapping music beat to ceilings and beams, as the percussion of dancers’ feet seemed to exhort going out beyond the harbor and into the straits—beyond the straits.

  “Doubt me not. A pair of dancers was dancing twenty years ago when I thought that I had settled in. We touched at Algeciras for only a day. The secret was that they moved when they did not, and did not move when they did. They wore black, and were as concentrated as birds startled upon alarm. Their dance was like that of the bees, for God in heaven they retracted and they turned and they jugged and they jiggled, and her back was as smooth as the gust from a fan, a sweep of vanilla, and in their movements unknown to them they pointed always west and to the sea. Though they moved up and down and to right and left, the lay of their furious dance pointed west and to the sea.

  “It was that way too, five hundred years ago, when from Spain’s jutting shelf they moved to fullfill the neglected task, their dancers doubtless pointing them. They found a new world with twenty-thousand miles of spine, peaks we have yet to climb, plains like seas, plants and animals humorous, terrifying, and new. Like bees, their passionate dancers had pointed them. I fear that I will die before I see such dancing anew, directing us after half a thousand years outward and to the heavens, where we must go if we are to be men.

  “For we are on the brink of new worlds, of infinite space curtains drawn and colored like silks, luminous and silent, moving slowly and with grace. We have come to the edge. Our children will view a terrible openness, and the vastness will change us forever and for good. I will never see it. I am seventy and I wish only to see dancers who will arise to set the right course.

  “In my heart of hearts at seventy on this ship stalled in the middle of the sea and stars, I wish for the dancers who will arise as did their predecessors in one wave linked with the past, moving when they do not move, not moving when they move. When I had passed half a century, I was awakened in the fury of a dance in Algeciras. Though a captain for many years, it was that day by the curve of her back that I became a Captain and a man—when I watched history artfully running its gates with iron grasp and steel-clad direction.”

  5

  ROTTERDAM IS approached rapidly from the sea through sand-flanked jetties. On the beaches, tents stood for the last of the holidays. The light was dimming as the Royal George dashed in past the Hook of Holland, and, when finally it was moored in a forest of tanks and spires, darkness spread across the flat as if a Flemish devil had sucked away the light through a crunchy reed.

  Marshall did not like it when Lydia kissed the crew goodbye. He resented that she pecked in affection at Wonderful Bellchicken and Greylock Oceanard, though he knew that as she kissed the bashful bastards of the deck force, she was extending as well his deep fraternity caught behind the proper ice of manhood.

  Then in a taxi to the city he ravished her and she ravished back. Hegenbuckle, the Dutch taxi driver, nearly crashed into a limestone mile post, a bus stand with a soup advertisement, and a group of sweet daisylike schoolgirls on bicycles, because he was glued to the mirror in which Marshall and Lydia k
issed with such verve that the glass fogged.

  As they rode through the flats of Rotterdam they paused momentarily to see great constructions of flame and spidery steel spreading for mile upon mile around them. Sparkling refineries beat against the clouds with bright ventilations of pulsing fire, drawn and tenuous like cotton candy, orange and upward in an explosion of the new virtues, an exposition of a new lifeblood. Certain fools thought that this was chemical engineering, a studious necessity, an obvious alacrity, a logical linkage. It was nothing of the kind, but rather a portrait by complications, an abstract of humor from above as impennous necessities were snared by thematic joking.

  Rather than lose his mind, Hegenbuckle spoke. “I have noticed,” he said, “that you are Americans. I told from her chestnut hair, her green eyes, her face worthy of a princess, and her long and articulate fingers—a very Dutch attribute. She is undoubtedly of the South, of Virginia, and a Jewess.”

  “Yes,” said Lydia.

  “I have been learning English. Since the time of Erasmus we Dutch have envied English. What an ecstatic language, a language to fill the boots of the greatest dream, a language of milk, a language of jewels. In itself it is worth more than nations. It strives and it loves, in words and phrase. Needless to say, like the water-bug, or the needle, we too love it and respect it as our king.”

  “It is everyone’s king,” said Lydia, squinting through the windshield as rain came down and wet the fields as green as watermelons.

  “He’s mad, isn’t he?” asked Marshall.

  “No, he’s not mad—just a little confused,” answered Lydia.

  At the train station, Hegenbuckle refused payment, saying, “It is not necessary. I never accept fares from Captain Keslake or his men. I am delighted to serve him, for I too have memories, of the flaming places of Djakarta and unkindled Curaçao. Throughout the Netherlands and throughout the world, they are quiescent and self-serving, dwellers on the human condition, lookers to the self, incapables of independence, living shanties of bastardized language, mechanicals who draw downward. But some day,” he said, lifting hands and eyes gradually in imitation of ascension, “we will rise. Rotterdam will be an old city like old wood. We will breathe easily as the universe opens to us. And the world will cease to agitate and boil.”

  6

  THERE WAS a train to Paris, which took many wonderful hours. On board were hundreds of musicians from New Orleans completing a vast worldwide tour. They played continuously as the train crossed Belgium and northern France. They were not practicing, but rather they played because they could not stop.

  Fat, brown, and bullet-shaped, Malcolm Tucker led his band in Marshall and Lydias car, and made his drummer base the tempo on the knocking of the tracks. Across heavily breathing countryside the train traced a steady line like ink from a mechanical pen. Malcolm Tucker had an uncanny resemblance to Monroe, but Marshall never had a chance to ask about it, for he and Lydia were held in their seats by the internal combustion of the music. When Malcolm Tucker played “Blue’n the Blues” over and over again, they were pushed against the furry backs of their chairs as if by a wave. New Orleans appeared before them hot and gleaming near the lapping Gulf.

  “I know this music,” said Lydia. “I grew up with it. It’s the music of the South, a distillation of war, slavery, and death, the unleashed human spirit cavorting in mathematics without symbols, flowing from weighted souls. Malcolm Tucker sure can play.”

  They reached Paris in the middle of the night. As if summer had come again, fiery music resounded through the train shed. Marshall and Lydia went with the herd of musicians through dark and silent streets lined with trees which had just begun to lose their leaves. In the attic of the Hotel Scribe, among giant drums pulling elevator cables, overlooking the arched and bow-shaped roofs of Paris, the musicians continued to play—slowly, slurring, half-dead. They played as they lay in their beds, as they ate, as they shaved. The roof vibrated. The sky was confused, having once looked down upon the ground of the Scribe when a farm had been there, and, before that, when it was green and waxy, a wolf-filled wood.

  Lydia took off her dress and washed at a pink lavabo by the bed. She lay back against Marshall, and he kissed her on the long, straight side of her face. As his forehead brushed against the soft hair of her temple, he tasted cold water. She told him to wash, and after he did and the blood had stopped beating in his eyes, when it was mild and soft, they lay back and listened to the arrogant strutting music. The warm autumn was soon to be cold and clear.

  In the morning, the musicians got each other up like a row of rising mah-jongg pieces. Malcolm Tucker lay in his undershirt, bunched-up on the bouncy bed. The pianist ran into the room.

  “Hey Malcolm. Hey Malcolm. Wake up. Those white kids is gone.”

  “Gone? Let’s see.” The two of them went to look. They stood in their underwear, exhausted but itching to play, and their faces had furrowed looks.

  “They sure move fast, Malcolm. They gone.”

  “That’s right, but we’re always around, travelin’ from place to place, crossin’ paths and such. It’s hot, Lewando. Why don’t you go down and see if you can get us a pitcher of ice-cold tomato juice with vanilla.”

  “You bet,” said Lewando, pulling on his shirt.

  Marshall and Lydia were bleary-eyed, on yet another train, rushing to the cool of the Alps and the sea-green of Chamonix. Lydia was pale, but she looked magnificent. Marshall watched her as she slept, alarmed that his all-too-active eye had seen her as purer than alabaster. But then, far above misty rows of pine the mountains appeared in sunlight, white ice reflecting in seething bursts like cannon fire in a battle. Lydia awoke and peered through the glass at the ice ramparts. Her face was indeed as smooth as alabaster, and she had magic in her eye.

  When they arrived in Chamonix they were extremely tired, but Marshall had a certain affection for viewing recurrent images from exhaustion. In the same way that the static and scratches on an old record can make it more hypnotic than if it were clear, so too the veil of fatigue can enhance the always incomprehensible greatness of mountains. They found that when they were tired there arose within them a driving power seldom utterly allayed, an imagination by which they could effortlessly travel the peaks, catapulted by self-generative vigor.

  Many a traveler has arrived in Chamonix late in the day and ignorantly wandered off to climb the mountains, as if they would succumb to so casual an assault. Marshall and Lydia saw from the unparalleled height and distance of the white world spread before them that they had to approach slowly. After they left their knapsacks at a little pension, they walked until the streets began to fade and clean meadows overtook them. They wound on an earthen path to the top of the hill which in that valley is such a nuisance to roads and railways. It allowed a long uninterrupted view of high fields, mountain walls, and mute bays of ice stopped still as if the world were only a photograph of itself. The great glaciers called out with cold Alpine names—Miage, Bionassay, Tacconaz, Bossons, Tour, Argentière, and the Mer de Glace. But for the few thin lines of the téléphériques, and a hut or two amid the mountains the great space before them was as uninhabited as the sea. It took such mighty leaps, and its spires thrust so high, that to look upon the depth and distance of it shocked and beat upon one’s insides as if a shell had exploded nearby.

  Somewhere at the junction of the Vallee Blanche (a great white wave which came tumbling in stillness from Mont Blanc) and the Mer de Glace (an enormous river of ice), Metzner lived in a wooden hut. He stayed on the glacier for months, despite the chance of being buried in an avalanche from the Vallee Blanche or swallowed in a crevass of the Bergschrund—where, in sharp and fickle disorganization, the glacier began.

  “I know from men like that whom I’ve met in the Sierras, that they don’t like to talk. Complete isolation stops the tongue. They become entrapped in their own silence,” said Lydia, gazing at the dance of clouds above the timberline. She knew almost surely that he would then contradict her, fo
r she could sense the tension to which he was often subjected because he didn’t really know who he was, because his mother (and possibly his father) had died by violence—and because he was, perhaps, a bastard. In these times, he drew away from her and became cold, possessed, and tormented. He had told her that more than anything in the world he hated hardening to her, but that he found a certain satisfaction at being driven, at being the agent of inevitability, at suffering the pleasurable siege of determination. She hoped for him someday to rid himself of those driven strengths which took him from her. They were, after all, about to venture onto the glacier in fulfillment of the first steps. As if he had not heard her, Marshall stared at the path leading to the mountains. “Marshall,” she said, “I think that men like Metzner become too embittered to remember anything reliably...”

  “That’s so,” replied Marshall. “But I know myself from complete isolation, that memory sharpens until it is a scalpel which cuts out the heart. Every detail has an edge, and the details swarm at you like gnats. I believe that the keenness of his memory will compensate for his reticence. First, though, we have to find him.” He motioned at the array of distances before and above them. “Look.”

  As they made downward, the city began to light up softly. They saw cows plodding through a gate, directed by a little boy with a switch in his hand. The copper-colored bells made them remember that one cow in Columbine had been given a bell, and that at night in their separate cabins they had heard it. They would rest on Sunday, outfit themselves the next day, and begin practice climbs to break in boots, clothing, and equipment. They were both fairly competent mountaineers, experienced on rock and ice.