Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  At dusk, they felt the vitality of the city as its lights snapped on by the thousands and gleamed over the ship-studded bay. Back down they went, passing Stella Maris and the naval headquarters from which, a lifetime before, Keslake had been summoned to intercept the Lindos Transit.

  In the palm-filled courtyard of the language compound, scores of Russians sat on benches, smoking cigarettes—the red dots of which spotted the darkness like socialist fireflies. Everyone was going to dinner, and Lydia put up her hair. The Russians—mainly chemists and chess players—were surprisingly formal at evening meals. Perhaps they thought that they were someplace else.

  Marshall considered his wife, her arms up like the arch on a wedding cake, her tanned face aglow in fluorescent light, her green eyes as lovely as tiny sea turtles. A cool breeze flooded the room; it was incomparably peaceful, until a long train of flatcars carrying tanks and halftracks passed outside their window. The fiberboard walls and plastic louvers shook as munitions cars raced by twenty or thirty feet away. Soldiers in battledress came out of the darkness into the flash of security lights and then disappeared in a tunnel of black. They had neutral, expressionless faces, and they lived in a different world.

  After the train had passed and Lydia was ready to go to dinner, Marshall thought that she had not noticed how it had affected him. But she had, and she came over and sat on the bed. “What kind of train was that?” she asked, knowing painfully well exactly what it was. As Marshall explained, she closed her eyes and embraced him.

  5

  BY CUSTOM, Marshall and Lydia strolled after dinner on the promenade near the seas edge in Bat Gallim. Whereas thousands of feet above on Rehov HaNassi there were groves of pine, by the sea on Quai Pinchas Margolin there were bent and humid palms among which at some time German immigrants had built chalets unsuited to the leveling wet sea winds.

  Killing time before he went on duty, the night watchman of the language compound came down the promenade as squadrons of breakers beat against the old sea wall. They had seen him often, sitting in a corner near the gate, surrounded by stark rays from a naked bulb above him, nearly enwrapped by vine tendrils, reading Egyptian paperback books. He wore a peaked desert-colored cap with a shiny black visor and a green band, and an ancient doublebreasted brown suit. Even in the light of the moon or burning tungsten, his skin was Alexandrine and dark; but his face was European.

  He sat down next to them on the bench where they had settled to be alone. Soon to die, he said, he paid more attention to chance contacts, convinced that his life had been too complex and varied just to slam shut like a wooden case. There had to be continuity, and before he died he had to connect, even if it meant intruding upon Marshall and Lydia with the acceptable tyranny of the aged. His name was Lamarel Foa.

  “That’s Italian, isn’t it?” asked Marshall. Both he and Lydia spoke an extraordinarily archaic and mellifluous Italian, one of their best shared assets.

  “It is one o half Italian, and one o half French. My father was o ho Italian, and my mother o ho French.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh ho. But as an little baby of o four, I was removed from the city of my birth, beautiful ancient Marseilles, and taken to Alexandria in Egypt. There for o fifty years I lived a life both wondrous and strange. In o nineteen o fifty-four I was exiled, and fled to Johannesburg, but then in o nineteen o sixty I came here, because I did not wish to be o ho South African. Would you like to hear the story of my life, a life of o eighty years?”

  “Sure,” said Marshall. “But listen, Lamarel, you don’t have to say o’ before numbers, or o ho’ before adjectives of nationality.”

  “Oh no?”

  “No.”

  “Oh ho. That will be useful, and save precious time, though time matters no more. But I do wish to improve my English.”

  “And I,” said Marshall, in Arabic, “would like to practice Arabic.”

  Lamarel was stunned. “It is a miracle that you speak Arabic,” he said. “We can help one another.”

  And then he spoke of his life, and at times of passionate memory he glided swiftly and irrevocably into Arabic. Speaking Arabic is like drowning upside down in a well, gasping for air and writhing. It soon tires the speaker and lays him out flat, exhausted, and wall-eyed. This, unknown to scholars, is the reason for the Arabs’ fatalism—their language is like a beautiful prison complete with guards who beat them.

  He told a tale of endurance—charming Lydia, stirring Marshall. The moon rose and made a perfectly smooth arc; the west wind came in from Egypt and the Delta; the soft lights of Stella Maris glowed from the mountain; and in a slow dipping rhythm, the lighthouse flashed its untiring beam.

  The eldest of his sons had died in a fall from Table Mountain in South Africa. “I said, ‘If you go there, you will die. Why climb steep walls?’ I asked him. I told him. But ... I know myself what it is to go where no one has gone. After all, I had lived through such a time. So I did not tell him, hoping that he would be strong and lucky, as I have always been. But he was not.”

  “But you did tell him.”

  “Only not to go, not what I myself had seen.”

  “What had you seen?”

  “How do you think I would feel if I were to tell you, strangers, when I did not tell my son, and he died?”

  "I see."

  “I must go. It is time to take up my post.”

  Lamarel plodded away to meet the rigors of a soft hot night. Marshall and Lydia returned to their room overlooking the railroad tracks and Kiryat Eliezer, behind which the hillside rose sharp and sudden in the moonlight all the way to Stella Maris, awash in silver blue.

  6

  THE ISRAELI Army is run by an elite corps of overweight teenage girls who are recruited to fill out forms and type orders. Every single one of them has red freckles. Sometimes they are not overweight, but slim and tall, and in that case their offices are crowded with soldiers and those begging to enlist. Summoned frequently to the yards of various commands for physicals and interviews, Marshall quickly made friends with a score of these girls, and what they said was always the same. They looked up, honestly hopeful, and said, “Your notice of when to report should come through in a week, maybe two weeks, maybe three ... okay, a month, but no more than two months ... four at the worst,” which meant six months. Marshall had the strongest impression that, save a few, these girls cared deeply for the tormented soldiers and reservists whose papers never came through, and he wondered how they could have enough tenderness to be genuinely concerned for the men behind the numbers, waiting outside their tiny offices in the long corridors of cool stone fortresses. In transit from the north to the south, or from the south to the north, with submachine guns slung from their shoulders and ammunition pouches at their waists, the thin, tough, and resigned soldiers, who looked as beaten as anvils, called the girls “angels.”

  To get from the language academy to the mobilization office, Marshall had to make his way through the waterfront, and he could not move an inch in Haifa port without attracting black marketeers, con men, pickpockets, and pimps, who thought that he was a Scandinavian sailor. If a ship from Northern Europe were in, Marshall had rough going amid the acres of vegetable carts, the placid sacks of coffee, and the roaring diesel trucks on Jaffa Road.

  Old men in blue serge suits came up to him and opened their jackets to display radios, watches, pistols, drugs, pornography, and (once) sandwiches. “You buy sandwich? Half price. Meat sandwich. Cheese sandwich. Pizza pie.”

  “No thank you,” said Marshall.

  “Wait! Buy meat sandwich, I give you pizza pie! Four pounds. Cheap.” He opened his coat, and Marshall saw slices of pizza pinned to the silk lining.

  “Atah meshuga,”said Marshall. “Completely nuts.”

  “Buy watch.” He opened the other side of his coat, and a chorus line of watches flashed in the sun.

  “No.”

  “Onions! Cheap! You buy onions. Make delicious soup.”

  An Arab bus from th
e West Bank was parked on a hill. Suddenly the brakes gave way, and the bus, empty but for the astonished driver, began to tear down the sidewalk, knocking over trash barrels and street signs, scattering the vendors and crushing their wares. A sea of hot cooking oil from a smashed felafel stand poured onto the street. Several cars went out of control and smashed head on, and a tank truck jackknifed. A tandem trailer carrying half a million oranges disintegrated, and the oranges exploded through the street like shrapnel. The old man bent and picked up half a dozen of them. Stumbling backward over hundreds of oranges, he said to Marshall, “Buy Israel oranges. Sweet, juicy, one pound! Half a pound. Twenty-five agorot. Ten agorot. Five. One. You drive a hard bargain.”

  “No,” said Marshall. “That’s not it!” He ducked up a side street toward the mobilization office, which was called the Lishcat HaGiyoos. On his way across the Municipal Park he noticed through the fountain that Lamarel sat quietly on the other side, studying his shoes.

  Poor Lamarel, thought Marshall. Lamarel had come early for weeks just to watch the Jordanian news and discuss it with Marshall in Arabic. When it got dark, Marshall would leave to go to the sea with Lydia, and Lamarel would sit on the porch and put in an extra hour or two in his peaked desert cap, guarding the language compound. Many times he had begged Marshall to come with him to the port and have a coffee, as he said, but Marshall had never had time. He knew that Lamarel wanted to dissuade him from joining the Army.

  Lamarel believed that Marshall could only come to ruin in the Levant, where one had to surrender, pay out, lie back, and live. He had seen too many like Marshall give up everything they had, and their lives, because they did not know the lax requisite submission of the East—simple rules of conduct written in the architecture of the cities, in the faces of the old, in the bold horizontal lines of Arabic, and in the olive-cluttered terraces on the hills. Even the illiterate knew, and could move in the right ways. But Marshall was unaware.

  As Marshall rounded the fountain, he saw that Lamarel was crying. But Lamarel caught sight of him, wiped his eyes, and took him by the arm. Marshall forgot the angels, and went instead with Lamarel down into the chaos of the port. There, on Jaffa Road, they were swept up in a confusion of smoke and rays inside a bar for Indian sailors. A jukebox played raga after raga after raga. Slight dark sailors in white cotton suits sat and lay under columns of sun streaming from a dirty glass window. Otherwise, it was nearly dark. Whores moved about, always sitting on the edges of the tables when they pulled up to a group of sailors, who seemed too frail and childlike for these elephant-legged Moroccan girls. Lamarel was known there. Immediately, a woman brought them beer and a tray of brownish-yellow hardboiled eggs, peppers, and white cheese. She bent down low to show her breasts. Marshall felt imprisoned by the beams and ragas, lifted, turned slowly on his head around and around. He had either to grasp the table, or float.

  Then Lamarel forced beer after beer into himself. “Have an egg,” he said to Marshall. Disgusted by the sulfurous egg, Marshall did not want to be rude, and ate it, after drowning it in salt. Soon he was at the beer. The more eggs, the more beer. The more beer, the more eggs. Finally he realized that the thick smoke weaving in the white rays was some sort of drug. He felt distended. He gave up for the afternoon on his perfect diet and perfect body—he was so strong that he could butterfly for an hour or more in the warm buoyant sea—and held fast to the table, trying not to fall down. Dravidian and dark, the sailors chirped all around him, their forever optimistic Indian speech making the room into a bazaar. All Marshall wanted was to go with Lydia to the wave-beaten sands south of Haifa, and dash himself in the sea. Then, in drunkenness and who knew what else, Lamarel began.

  “I was born,” and when he said “born,” he slammed his fist on the table as old men of the city often did, “in Marseilles. In the summer of 1899 my father and mother left on a coal wheeler and crossed the Mediterranean to Alexandria. Marseilles, though I hardly remember it, was the apron of civilization; upon it the winds of Africa cast themselves upwelling and hot. It was a silent pocket, forgotten, heated, erotic; but I must be speaking of Alexandria and Cairo, for I did not know Marseilles.

  “It comes before me very often, and those are the times when I think I am again about to die. Let me drink, and I will tell you of the Mediterranean peoples, defeated peoples unlike those you know, cast about and weakened until they found that the greatest power lay in acceptance of worshipped acts. I say as a beaten Jew that we were a parody of the condition put upon us, and that in our fall we were driven like dust in the afternoon air. We moved together in the heat like pine needles on the trees in the shadows of Meron. We were made ridiculous, laughable, sweaty, drained, even ugly, and all the time we held the amber light for which we fell. We were, all of us here—the Muslims, the Jews, the Christian ladies—parodies of flesh, a quarter of the globe orchestrated to amuse the Divinity, made to dance the falling dance, wills receding before the touch of God, dear God, ever so gently, and yet our lives continued. By our complete acceptance and belief, we have defied Him beyond measure.

  “But I have learned a trick of His. He will not let you speak of Him for more than an instant without seeming like a fool. Therefore, you can throw out any whose profession is to be a man of God. These are the worst imposters, devils who belong at best in a carnival. They are lower than normal men, for what they pretend to be. I once punched a rabbi.”

  “What happened?” asked Marshall, gripping the table to stay afloat.

  “He beat me over the head with a candlestick until I fell unconscious. But what does this have to do with you? Nothing. However, I can tell you that as sure as my name is Lamarel Foa, everyone in Bat Gallim thinks that I am mad.”

  “I know,” said Marshall. “The bakers wife told me never to speak to you because you are possessed.”

  “Ah, those horrible peasants! They are superstitious and they know nothing. I cannot even buy stamps or a newspaper in Bat Gallim, for they fear to look me in the eye. All because of the flies in my room. And who do you think sent me those flies?”

  “Flies?”

  “Yes. One night about ten years ago there were hundreds of flies in my room. I had no screens, and there were so many that I breathed them. I had nothing—no newspaper, stick, or broom—with which to drive them away. So I picked up my chair and used it. The chair was heavy, and not very accurate. I broke most of the things in my room. I smashed pictures, plates, light bulbs, every thing, and only managed to kill one or two flies. It was so frustrating that I began to scream. When I stopped, covered with sweat, I looked up, and saw two hundred people watching me from the street. Boys had climbed trees for a better view. Just then the fire brigade arrived and, as is the custom with lunatics, sprayed me with cold water. I was so humiliated that I did not leave my house for two years. During that time, there was no reason to shave. When I came out on the street for the air raid sirens in the June War, my beard was five feet long and my hair came down to my waist. The people of Bat Gallim will not forget that. They have their own reputation and need someone to whom they can feel superior.

  “You see, in 1957, a certain butcher named Shlomo had calendars printed and distributed throughout the quarter to every household. They had a beautiful color photograph of the Bat Gallim Casino, and everyone was so proud that they hung these calendars and used them to determine the dates of festivals and holidays.

  “Everything was fine except for two mistakes. The printer had put that Carnival and Purim came together on the same day, and not only was there that mistake but that day was also listed as Fool’s Day. Joke and costume shops in Haifa had to stay open at night for weeks as everyone in Bat Gallim decided to burn both candles in this triple holiday of madness, which, of course, did not really exist. In addition, the Moroccan and Bulgarian immigrants (who did not know of such things) wanted desperately to excel in the ways of their new homeland, and competed ferociously in devising practical jokes and nonsensical schemes. Even I, with no taste at all for buffoo
nery, bought plastic fangs and goggle eyes—they were popular at the time.

  “Then a report appeared in the paper that a government delegation was coming on the day of madness. It was to consist of the Minister of Immigrant Absorption, the head of the Jewish Agency, the Prime Minister, the two Chief Rabbis, the President, and, for good measure, the Chief Rabbi of Brazil. The purpose of the visit was for them to be shown how well the new immigrants had adapted to national customs. ‘They can’t fool us,’ said the people of Bat Gallim. We know what to do.’

  “On the appointed evening, a long official motorcade crossed the tracks and entered Bat Gallim. To their surprise, not a soul was to be seen on Rehov HaAliyah. But when they turned down Bat Gallim Avenue and made for the sea, they saw the entire population assembled on the sidewalks. Every man, woman, and child wore a disguise—fake beards, buck teeth, crossed eyes, wigs, and costumes made of skins, aluminum, paper, whatever. Women dusted the palm trees, and the children had been instructed to bend down and break wind at the visitors—a mission which they carried out with great gusto.

  “The high officials and their staffs were stunned. They got out of their cars and looked around them in astonishment. The people of Bat Gallim are not stupid, and immediately recognized that something was wrong. Not daring to reverse themselves, they became very serious and embarrassed, and, with their costumes on, they proceeded to carry out their plans.

  “A wretched Bulgarian woman with goggle eyes, a fish tied on her head, and frogman’s flippers, approached the dignitaries, gave them bunches of weed, and recited Slavic palindromes. In tears, the mayor rode up to the motorcade, facing backward on a jackass. He was supposed to have given a welcoming speech, but all he could do was weep. And this fellow had had his eye on a seat in the Knesset. Politics are fickle.