Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  When the Commander of the Second Mountain Brigade had walked into the courtyard of waiting recruits, the forces driving Marshall were temporarily stilled and quieted. It was as if he had always been in pain, and then the pain had stopped. He was puzzled and did not understand. He did not realize that the Commander of the Second Mountain Brigade was his father.

  2

  TEL HASHOMER, or Bakum, had about it the air of a navel, being the center of gravity for military affairs, in almost the exact middle of the country, and where regular soldiers like Marshall, Robert, and Lenny were inducted and released. It was the busiest place Marshall had ever seen, a hive of soldiers and equipment. It looked like a staging area for an invasion, an Italian opera during a martial finale, or a Roman farce, and Marshall and his friends could hardly move a step without being cut off by a tight column of armed troops, hurrying down one road or another.

  Once, six infantry battalions intersected at a crossroads, where an MP in the center directed them like traffic, motioning through the shortest columns first. The last group was half a mile long. Soldiers not in formation were running heatedly from place to place, beads of sweat on their red faces, equipment jangling from them like the pots and pans of peddlers. And mechanized equipment—either singly, in platoons of half a dozen, or in armored columns of staggering size—was moving everywhere else. Marshall, Robert, and Lenny stood open-mouthed at a corner as two hundred tanks drove past them no more than ten feet apart. The motors of one tank are as concussive as all the drums in a symphony orchestra resounding in unison. The sound of two hundred tanks shakes the earth and vibrates buildings as if they were hollow reeds.

  The recruits of the Mountain Brigades walked a few miles past unending supply dumps, vehicle parks, tank depots, arsenals, armories, hospitals, and fortifications. They were headed for the Identification Division, where they would be photographed and issued documents, and where a record would be made of their teeth. If a body were too mutilated or burnt to identify, someone would resort to reading its cavities and crowns. On the way, they saw a distant hill covered with dark green vegetation. “That’s funny,” said Lenny. “Every inch of this place is taken up with military stuff. Why do you think they left that hill there?” As they closed on it they discovered that, though a hill, it was covered not with vegetation but rather with an infantry brigade of nearly 2,000 soldiers in drab green battle regalia, who were all looking intently into a small canvas booth. Marshall assumed that a general was addressing his command. What else could hold the attention of 2,000 armed men sitting under the hot sun? But as the recruits passed they were able to see inside the booth. There was no general lecturing on the fine points of war, and no tactician explaining the capabilities of a newly acquired weapon. It was a puppet show—little Hebrew-speaking puppets bouncing up and down on a stage surrounded by flowers.

  After bored dentists had called out the peculiarities of their teeth, they were marched into a dining hall and given a class-2 Army meal. Marshall and his companions were used to this fare, the sustenance of every kibbutz. It can be described in three words—Polish Oasis Cuisine. However, they noticed that the boiled potatoes were covered with blue stains. Marshall summoned the dining hall officer on duty. By custom, he was armed.

  “What’s this?” asked Marshall, pointing at the blue potatoes.

  “What’s what?”

  “This,” he said, indicating the potatoes more fervently by moving his hand back and forth in accusation. The officer looked.

  “Potatoes,” he said.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Don’t you eat potatoes in America?”

  “They’re blue!”

  “The potatoes in America are blue?”

  “No! These potatoes are blue.”

  “Oh yes. These potatoes are blue. So?”

  “Why?”

  “Why? I don’t know why. Who am I, Sherlock Holmes?” The officer started to walk away, but pivoted around. “As it happens,” he said, “I do know. I just remembered. The soldiers who peeled the potatoes have just come back from testing fountain pens.”

  Marshall was speechless. Then he said quietly, “Didn’t they wash their hands?”

  “Why?” asked the officer, departing. “Ink is clean. It comes from rocks.”

  After the magical point at which the recruits were issued their equipment and uniforms, and suddenly became indistinguishable from battle-worn veterans, the dining hall officer approached, towing a higher-ranking, pashalike, Egyptian-looking fatso who carried a swagger stick. “This is the one,” said the officer. With fire in his eyes, the “Egyptian” approached Marshall. Marshall could hardly believe what followed, but it did.

  “You say,” said the fat pasha, “that it isn’t cashér for kitchen troops to test fountain pens. You say, that we don’t know how to run a cashér kitchen. You say, that I don’t know my job. You say, that I am guilty of violating the commandments. You say, that ink does not come from rocks. You say, that I should be reprimanded by the rabbis. You say, that I should be thrown from the Army like garbage and cast out on the street to beg and die.”

  Marshall was at a loss for English words, much less Hebrew.

  “Who were your confederates?”

  “These two,” said the other officer.

  “All right then, the three of you, come with me.”

  They protested, but the pasha screamed, saying that he was a major and they were hardly even privates. How dare they not follow his orders immediately? He made them stand at attention, sticking out their chests and chins. Then he marched them off, kitbags on their shoulders, away from the others in the Second Mountain Brigade. A week later and they would have told him to go to hell. But they didn’t know, and they ended up in a vast supply hall. It was cool inside and the whitewashed ceiling was very high; its white and off-white color currents mixed like the visual acoustics of an eggshell.

  Stacked against one wall were a dozen cartons. In the middle of the room a long black table was covered with pads of paper and big bottles of ink.

  “Oh no,” said Lenny.

  That night they tested a thousand fountain pens. They were shown how, and left alone. None of them had slept the night before. Marshall had been so keyed up that he had stared at Lydia until dawn, drumming his fingers on the sheet as he contemplated her sleeping face.

  So it was difficult indeed to fill, test, and empty all those pens, especially since they worked in the light of only one forty-watt bulb. In a fit of remorse, the dining hall officer came at midnight and gave them chocolate bars and cold water. They worked in a stupor until the sun rose. Of one thousand pens, twenty were defective.

  At seven the pasha arrived and threw them out. They walked in a daze to an empty assembly point, with no idea of how to join the rest of their Brigade Group. An officer passed, and they asked him what to do. With the greatest confidence, he told them to stay where they were. Soon, another contingent would be along and they could ride down with it to the big training base in the Negev, where they could rejoin their unit.

  Within half an hour they were surrounded by fresh troops. In another four or five hours, the trucks came and they embarked. These troops were much rougher than any Marshall had ever seen. He thought that it was because they were battle-hardened. Like a crazed mob, they rushed for the best seats in the truck, and, as he was climbing in, he was kicked in the face. Finally, the three Americans sat deep inside, and the trucks started rolling. They could see minute spangles of sun coming through pinholes in the dark canvas. The teeth and eyes of the other soldiers shone—they seemed to be very unusual. s> 3 ‹

  3

  IT WAS a convoy of six trucks escorted by four jeeploads of military police. Soon the three Americans realized that the troops with whom they rode had special qualities. For example, five or six of them screamed continually, as if they were trying to say something and knew no language. But these few created only one point in a trident of noise. Another point was the irresponsible gunning of the motor by
the truck’s driver, and his habit of traveling at high speeds in low gear. Point three was the conversation of the remaining soldiers, who seemed one and all to have hearing defects. Their shouts were repugnant and damaging. And, a soldier in the back near Marshall had his hand in his pants and was busily masturbating. They tried to ignore him, but he just went on and on.

  Someone had cut a hole in Lenny’s kitbag and was in the process of removing a winter jacket when Robert lifted him bodily and cast him to the other side of the truck, near a man who was ugly, mean-looking, and rather large. Though the truck was crowded and people were pressed together, he enjoyed several feet of bench all his own.

  Most of the soldiers had a crazed demented look which caused their eyes to seem like the windows of a slot machine in which were visible not the symbols of apples, diamonds, or bells, but rather a high-speed shuffling of evil thoughts, remembrances and anticipations of evil deeds, and the singular electrical flashes of the evil mind. Except for the kingpin, they were horrendously slight, scarred, undernourished, and nervous. As if each one had just finished sixteen cups of espresso, they couldn’t sit still; they shook; they trembled; they chattered; they and their faces erupted into hideous smiles and wide-eyed laughter. Their teeth were rotten, and projected at a universe of angles within the various mouths, but those teeth not gone were white and sparkling.

  Ten miles from Bakum, one of them went to the back of the truck, hung off the side, and threw himself into a ditch. The convoy stopped short and two military policemen chased after the jumper, who had a limping head start of about a hundred feet. The soldiers cheered for him and went wild when he climbed into the curly fork of an olive tree and kicked at the MPs. He was screaming: “I want to go home! I want to go home!” Finally, the MPs grabbed his feet and started to pull him, but he held on and screeched like a cat. They pulled, and pulled, and seemed only to shake the tree.

  A young lieutenant approached the scene and yelled an order. Another MP who was sitting in a police jeep, gun trained at the knot of heads protruding from the back of Marshall’s truck, rushed forward, his weapon at the ready.

  “Put that down, you fool!” shouted the lieutenant.

  “Yes, Commander!” answered the MP. Then the lieutenant said something to him, and he ran to the tree, where the two other MPs were in a sweat trying to break the jumper’s grip. The jumper was stretched as straight as a ruler and the tree shook as if it were in a fit. The third MP looked tentatively at the lieutenant.

  “Go ahead, idiot,” said the lieutenant.

  The third MP walked carefully under the jumper and looked up at his exposed belly. Then he turned briefly and flashed a foolish smile at the convoy, after which he reached with one finger and gently touched the jumper’s stomach, saying, “Kitchee-kitchee-coo!”

  The jumper bent double so convulsively that he caught the MP between the two halves of him as if the MP had sprung a bear trap. The more the MP struggled to free himself, the more he tickled the jumper, and the tighter the jumper closed, shrieking hysterically all the while. Finally, like an umbrella in a storm, the jumper sprang the other way, and the dazed MP got up and staggered about.

  After the jumper had been thrown back in the truck, Marshall heard the lieutenant mumbling to himself, “These bastard madmen are all incredibly ticklish.” Marshall remembered the many times Lydia had reached out to him at night and caused him to jump two feet in the air, prone, with just a gentle loving touch to do it. He was incredibly ticklish, the most ticklish boy in Eagle Bay. Perhaps, then, he was a madman. He seemed, after all, to be riding in a caravan of lunatics.

  The jumper was unbelievably frail and looked like a wooden puppet. There was no muscle or flesh on him, as if he had been ravished by polio. The kingpin picked him up and put him on his lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He stroked the little fellow’s head in affection. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “I am Yakov,” said the marionette, terrified, squirming to get away. But the kingpin held him in a tight grip and would not let go.

  “I am Ashkenazi,” said the kingpin (most certainly a Moroccan). “Yakov, you will be my servant.”

  The soldiers burst into laughter. Yakov did not dare laugh, but his eyes searched back and forth in terror. Occasionally he would have a fit of squirming, but Ashkenazi held him tighter and tighter, as if Yakov were a bird that Ashkenazi had just trapped and wanted to observe before roasting. All Yakov’s hysteria and weakness showed in his darting liquid eyes. He seemed to be looking for a way out, but he saw only the darkening canvas and the hills in dusk.

  4

  THEY APPROACHED Jerusalem in half-darkness. Its walls were as white as the moon. The city lay across hills between which were stands of pine, and the air was clear and touching. Marshall strained to see out the back of the truck and saw mainly a darkening blue space framed in a vault of overstretched canvas. There was a certain rhythm to the way the convoy moved through the outskirts of the city—up and down hills, around corners, stopping for a moment at crossroads—and it was sad to see warm lights shining from the lovely red-roofed houses of Jerusalem stone.

  They knew something had gone very wrong, and that having come so far they might never reach the Negev. Through cautious questioning, they discovered that they were in a convoy of prisoners experimentally released for service in the Army to help alleviate the critical manpower shortage. Ashkenazi was a murderer. Others were rapists, muggers, burglars, drug peddlers, pimps, male prostitutes—there was even a bookie, who seemed likely to explode from frustration because he was convinced that he was a white-collar criminal improperly confined with cutthroats.

  But not all were criminals. In a stroke of genius, the Army had leavened the brew with a choice selection of terminal idiots, cretins, and the several alingual lunatics who—as if their noise were necessary to power the truck—had never stopped screaming. There were as well many innocents; terrified fat boys who had failed the lenient selection tests both physically and mentally and then found themselves inducted into the Army in the company of incorrigibles; maniacs with no apparent defects except that they had gone to mobilization offices and begged to be conscripted (the harried clerks had a system with which to skewer these irregulars, and skewered they were); and normal soldiers in transit kidnapped by the guards because a few convicts had escaped and had to be replaced.

  The kidnapped normal soldiers gravitated together as soon as they could recognize each other. They cursed and clenched their fists. It was refreshing to see genuine undisturbed anger, to sense a yeoman's indignation amid the rocking and screaming of bedlam.

  One of the normal soldiers was a Kurd named Baruch. Just nineteen, he had already seen a year’s service in a demolition platoon. Sensing that Marshall, Robert, and Lenny were civil, he cut a path through the lunatics. As darkness settled completely and they forged steadily north toward what they guessed was Ramallah, Baruch conferred with them conspiratorially. They exchanged information and formulated a plan. At their destination, which Baruch said was likely to be a camp called the Fourth Daughter, they would band together and insist on seeing the base commander. Baruch would speak for them. This seemed reasonable and likely to work.

  They rumbled through the green and yellow steel gates of the Fourth Daughter and drove up a hill to a vast concrete field where the trucks formed a line and the incorrigibles scrambled out into the cold. Though they had sweated in Tel HaShomer, in the Fourth Daughter the high mountain air was clear and frigid. Beyond a hazy ring made by the security lights Marshall could see massive sharp blue shapes—mountains and hills—while above, the stars burned and trembled like blazing phosphorus.

  The cold silenced even the worst of the criminals. They shivered and clutched themselves in the light of two spotlights on the MP jeeps. Young officers and sergeants from the camp counted them. Then the MPs switched off their floodlights and drove away. This produced a chorus of whistles and cheers from the prisoners, but a strong hoarse voice came out of the darkness: “Sil
ence! Beasts!” Even the prisoners, used to terror in the bottom of the worst jails, became frightened.

  A major had spoken. They could barely see him. Only his silhouette was visible and it comprised a sharp peaked cap, a swagger stick, and a frame as upright as iron. Baruch swallowed and was moved to reassess his plan. But he stepped forward courageously, the three Americans directly behind. He approached the Major, who was only a high-angled shadow.

  Baruch was so short, stocky, and muscular—no army shirt could close on his neck—that it seemed at first as if something were terribly wrong with him. He had a thin pencil mustache, and one of his front teeth was chipped. To supply a great mass of chunky muscles with decent amounts of oxygen, he was obliged to breathe hard through an open mouth. He had a lisp, and the continual passage of air past the chipped tooth added a high-pitched whistle to his labored respiration. Standing at attention before the Major, he appeared to be a prize example of the flotsam trucked in for a lesson in the sternness of an army always embarrassed because it was not stern. Baruch had that certain Syrian woodchuck look, as opposed to the coffee-colored frailty and gray lips of the North Africans. The Major detested both types.