by Mark Helprin
Being what they were, the criminals could not help each other. In trial, they turned against their companions, making any ordeal worse. One went on a brief rampage with a kitchen knife. Others threw food, carried on petty feuds, or told the officers when someone had found a comfortable hiding place in a dark storeroom.
Marshall kept falling. A captain told him to bring a lemon. When, in confusion, he brought an orange instead, the captain screamed at him as if he were going to kill him. The more Marshall fell, the more they thought it funny to trip him. Finally, he hit his head on a boot, and blood streamed down his face. He felt a fluttering inside, and couldn’t get up. Everything above him seemed like men and devils and sounds and smoke moving in hostile whirlwinds. He crawled forward, trying to reach the kitchen, but Robert and Lenny picked him up and brought him into the bakery, where they gave him some tea, and meat they had stolen from the Major’s table. Marshall ate for strength, crying all the while like a drunk. He thanked them and thanked them and would not stop thanking them.
“That’s all right, Marshall,” they said. “You can do the same for us.”
Baruch came by, with a broom in his hand and a tentlike apron draped across his middle. “It hurths,” he said. “I know. Insthide.”
“I’m married,” said Marshall, his heart racing yet weak, his eyes glassy and acid. “I have a wife, and I left her out there in the rain and darkness.”
“Not tho,” said Baruch. “Not in the dark or the rain.”
“Yes, she is,” Marshall said, shaking. “Yes, she is. I left her alone there.”
“Not alone, in the kibbutths, with friendths. It’th warm and thafe there.”
A sergeant burst in and dragged Marshall to the pot room, a freezing cold cockpit lighted by a flickering candle. Wind whistled through the cracks and sometimes brought in rain. Marshall and a tea-colored Libyan who chanted again and again, “The moon, the moon, the moon,” had to wash five-foot-high cauldrons which came to them full of slop and caked food. The storm had knocked out the hot water. Their arms grew numb and blue. Because they had to crawl inside the cauldrons, their clothes and hair were soaking wet and covered with stinking garbage. Marshall wondered how long he could keep going. After two hours, the Major walked in, flanked by two younger officers whom he was trying to impress.
Perhaps they had just finished a long conversation over hot coffee and pastry brought by the animals in Marshall’s platoon. The angles of the Major’s jaw matched perfectly the brim of his peaked cap, and his face was cruelly symmetrical. The other officers screamed at Marshall and the Libyan to stand to attention.
Holding his breath, the Libyan stood with fists clenched and a crazed smile. Marshall didn’t strain very hard to stand straight, and brushed something wet and soft from his forehead. Dirty water streamed down his neck. The wind howled darkness like a dog, and the candle nearly blew out. Marshall felt feverish. He saw the Major’s stick, held under his arm like a riding crop. He remembered the Major’s pompous gait and his vanity at table.
“I hope you do a good job,” said the Major, barely concealing his disgust at having to address two such repulsive creatures. “I want you to scour these pots perfectly. There’s been a cholera epidemic recently in Ramallah and we’ve had a few cases here. I don’t want to get cholera. So be clean. Make them shine. Is that understood?”
Marshall was so enraged that he felt as if he were going to float into the air.
“Yes, Commander,” answered the Libyan, but Marshall was trembling like a lunatic. He bared his teeth. The Major stepped back and took a tight hold on the stick. He too was mad.
“Soldier! I asked you a question!”
“You take your question...” answered Marshall, saying each word roundly and making it vibrate. “You take your question, and shove it, you stinking son of a bitch baboon-faced faggot bastard!”
The Major turned to his aides. They shrugged their shoulders. “In Hebrew please,” asked one of them.
“Oh,” said Marshall. “Yes, Commander!” After the Major left, one of the officers stuck his head back through the doorway and said quickly into the dim light, “Its lucky for you that I agree with what you said. Shalom.”
They were marched back in the rain. In the barracks, Ashkenazi sat surrounded by three candles, reading a pornographic magazine from Turkey. Yakov held it and obediently turned the pages. Everyone threw himself down and slept straight away, but several hours later, when the storm had passed, a fresh batch of sergeants circulated in the freezing darkness, waking the men. “Arise!” they said. “Arise!” Once again there was to be a night march around Ramallah.
Marshall awoke freezing cold and in pain, but when he got up and pulled on his battle gear he felt excited and happy. A great surge of energy passed through him, and everyone seemed to share in a feeling of well-being. Sleep had at last become irrelevant. He made his way to the cold-water tap. Nearby, people were urinating and it sounded like horses. Nonetheless, the air was fresh, and though it had been cold in the barracks, the night was filled with currents of warm air. The storm had vanished completely, and the stars and shooting stars (of which there are always many in the mountains near Jerusalem) seemed like a soft meadow of light.
As they marched on the road to Ramallah it was deathly quiet. Just a few bulbs sparkled low and yellow from the houses and the minaret towers, past which the air flew and wound and doubled over. Marshall thought of Lydia, and his love for her lifted him. It was only the fifth day and he had already learned their tricks. Though he might have seizures, fall to the ground, and bleed; though he might be taken for a criminal; though his face be cut and infected, his body sore and starving, his clothes greasy and malodorous; though he might break and weep and be driven somewhat mad; though he was at last and finally completely out of control—he would survive and make it through. Or perhaps he would die, but he would fight them at every turn.
If he could awaken in the middle of the night and find himself lost in a hundred million stars, if he could walk down a road in a tranquil bath of sweet air, and if things were so apt to be turned upside-down despite the designs of men, he could not lose in the end, for the will of the world was a most marvelous and independent thing.
That night they walked around Ramallah nine times until the sun came up and the wind rattled everything that could be moved.
7
THEY HAD marched out of the Fourth Daughter in a great column of two thousand armed men, of which they had been able to see neither the beginning nor the end but just a powered line weaving the road. The three platoons of criminals had been shunted off in different directions after about four miles. Marshall remembered the featureless expressions of the peasant soldiers in back of him who had rushed, weapons in hand, to take up slack in the line. “Where are they going?” one of the criminals had asked a lieutenant.
“They are going to conquer Tulqarm.”
“Excuse me, sir, but didn’t we already conquer that, in 1967?”
“It’s an exercise, idiot.”
“Why aren’t we going?”
The lieutenant looked them over. “Because you lice couldn’t conquer a post office box, that’s why.”
He was not entirely correct. Despite their seventeen languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Moghrabi, French, Italian, English, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Kurdish, Farsi, Hindi, Amharic, Spanish, Tuareg, Bulgarian, Rumanian), their communications were superb. They were so nervous and overactive that even innuendos traveled throughout the group like lightning along a well-watered synaptic pathway. Despite their ignorance and insanity, they were resourceful. In two weeks they had stolen everything halfway valuable in the camp, even if it had been bolted down and guarded. Despite their physical weakness, they were brawlers and dirty fighters, and they had terrible tempers. Easily a third of the criminals were epileptics, like Marshall, but in their seizures they grew terrifically violent, manifesting the strength of ten men. Marshall knew that in a battle, instead of pitching and whirling about like crazed tr
ance dancers, Sufis, they would hold still and turn the world about them in fury. That, in fact, was why they were criminals. There was a tempest in them. Only when they applied it to others and the world beyond could they be still. Despite their poor marksmanship, lack of comprehension in regard to automatic weapons and specialized equipment, and absolutely maddening casualness about hand grenades—they kicked them around like soccer balls—they were just good enough with weapons to conquer a post office box, possibly even the post office itself, and maybe even a poorly defended small town.
Strung out along a stone wall, they were resting in a field, prior to an exercise of their own in which the fifty of them were supposed to take a distant hill defended by another platoon. About a thousand feet high, the hill was covered with rocky terraces and redoubts, and the sun shone from behind it, blinding the attackers. At various points officers were posted as judges, their field glasses sometimes glinting as they scanned the game board.
Marshall studied the hill. It was impossible to get to the summit alive via the light-lacquered west face, and he assumed that they would use an indirect approach. F-4 Phantoms and Mirages flew across the sun on runs in support of the troops taking Tulqarm, and the criminals were denuding a nearby fig orchard as three Arab women looked on gravely and impassively from the roof of their house. Marshall had learned not to interfere as his barracks mates stole. This was for them the holiest of activities, and, if interrupted, they would rage like jackals pulled away from meat. But he was angry and disgusted that they made off with half the crop of an innocent kitchen garden.
“Criminals will be criminals,” said Lenny.
“But they don’t have to be taken into the Army.”
“If it’s a little army fighting big armies, yes they do. More than half a million Egyptians, half a million others, and a few hundred thousand us.”
“That’s not so. Numbers are not decisive in the case of war,” said Marshall. “For example, the two of us could take that hill and be waiting for the judges when they come to the summit to report to the citadel commander that all of us have been killed.”
Lenny looked at the blue flag waving from atop the seemingly unconquerable hill, and shook his head. “Ha!” he said.
“I’ll show you,” said Marshall. “Just wait until the orders come through.”
They rested. Yakov loaded figs into Ashkenazi’s knapsack. Some soldiers drank water and ate sunflower seeds, but most slept, their rifles and machine guns leaning against the wall. The Arab women continued to stare at the half-naked trees, thin from lives on rocky soil.
Marshall was half asleep, thinking about the beach at Amagansett. He saw Livingston, a younger, dark-haired man, showing him how to dive through the waves. “Like this,” he said, and dived into an eight-foot breaker, disappearing as if into another dimension. Livingston was forever puzzled because Marshall refused to do as he had done—taking instead the full force of the wave, being knocked down, pulled under, and swept along upside-down and backward thudding against the bottom, only to emerge fifty yards away choking with foam, sand, and salt. “Marshall. Dive through the waves,” Livingston said to the six-year-old. “You can dive into the pools of the Croton River. Go through. That way, you won’t get battered each time.”
Marshall had looked at the breaking surf for a long while, as if he were judging something. At last he turned to Livingston, who delighted in seeing the little face with a missing tooth. “Well? Are you going to go through the waves?”
“No,” Marshall had said.
The lieutenant’s voice broke all reveries, and he had them stand to as he explained his completely idiotic plan for a direct frontal attack. They would all be killed. “Robert, do you want to come with us?” asked Marshall.
“Yes.”
“Help me make a diversion.” Marshall picked up a rock, and, when no one was looking, threw it at Ashkenazi. At the same time, Robert pushed the son of a Rumanian butcher into a Hungarian second-story man. The second-story man attacked the butcher’s son, and Ashkenazi, who thought that he had been a victim of their fallout, proceeded to demolish them both. The uproar was tremendous and groups formed around the fighters.
Marshall, Lenny, and Robert flipped themselves backward over the stone wall. As the fight played itself out after the lieutenant fired a shot in the air, they dropped down a hill and ran past the Arab house onto a road.
From the road, they could see the rest of the platoon sneaking like thieves amid rocks and bent trees. “They’re crazy. They’ll all be dead before they reach the second kilometer on the flats.”
“And what about us?” asked Robert. “Where are we that’s so special?”
“Don’t worry,” said Marshall. “We’ll have that flag in our hands in an hour and a half. We might have to wait here for a while, but probably not for long.”
They thought he was crazy, but in ten minutes they saw a truck coming down the narrow road. Marshall stuck out his hand pompously. The Arabs in the truck looked at them in deferential hostility. “Oh sirs,” said Marshall. “Would it be your pleasure to provide small transportations?”
“Surely, oh my sir,” said the driver, hardly able to refuse three armed soldiers.
“Why do you ride with us?” asked one of them. “You have many tanks and trucks.”
“Reasons of state and developmental prerogatives of the littoral republics in the Arab League,” answered Marshall, lifting a phrase from many winters past in the language laboratory at Boylston Hall.
“You are not Israelis, are you?”
“We are of all nations and all beliefs,” answered Marshall, “and we have come to Algiers to affirm the solidarity of the Third World in the price evaluation of basic commodities essential to Western manufacture.”
“Oh,” said the Arab. He laughed nervously and was silent for the rest of the trip.
“Why did you say that to them?” asked Lenny, afterward, when Marshall had translated the conversation.
“Because I don’t know how to say anything else,” answered Marshall. “All they ever taught us was political stuff, the Koran, and medieval anatomy texts.”
They hid their packs, shovels, helmets, and jackets. Shortsleeved and draped with weapons and ammunition, they began the ascent, taking little care, intent upon reaching the top quickly. The cliffs were steep, and there were places where Marshall normally would have used pitons and etriers. But they moved along smoothly, and the sun reflected from the bronze rock, hot and hale even in November.
Their weapons sometimes clattered against the stone, but it didn’t matter. The sound could not arch over the summit, and the wind was coming from the other side. They climbed using hand-jambs and chimneying cracks the way Marshall showed them, and every once in a while they would look out into the blue spaces where gulls wheeled and turned after inland flights from the sea.
As they got higher, they saw Ramallah past a low hill, rising in white patches and artful spires. They thought that in a hundred feet or so they would be able to see Jerusalem, and they were right. It was a series of quiet terraces sitting in the static mist which even clear light sets between distance and the eye. Al Aqsa glowed and winked a gold fleck. They wondered what the gulls could see from thousands of feet above and what the pilots could see from planes so far up that they seemed silent and weightless.
From a distance the three climbers looked like mites on the rock walls. Finally they reached a spot just under the lip of the summit. Marshall peeked over. “They’re all there, looking the other way. Ten soldiers and three judges. There’s a sentry post between us and them, but the sentry is a Bengali and he’s also looking the other way. They’re downhill from us.”
Staying in position, Lenny silently lifted his automatic rifle over the ledge and trained it on a group near the flag. He put two extra clips of ammunition on the rock, and took a bead. Marshall and Robert crept over the ledge and hid. Marshall had a knife in hand, and three grenades hooked to his belt. Robert held a submachine gun, and
carried an extra magazine in his teeth. They moved forward while Robert kept his gun trained on some soldiers who had a light machine gun on a tripod, and who were reclining in a sandbagged pit.
Marshall and Robert stopped at a flat rock. Robert took position, well within comfortable range. They looked back at Lenny and saw him staring quietly down the barrel of his rifle. The soldiers at the citadel took occasional long-distance shots at those in the platoon who were unfortunate enough to be trapped near the base of the hill. Marshall heard a captain say, “He’s dead,” as he put down his binoculars and checked off a figure on a clipboard.
Marshall removed his shirt and crawled toward the sentry, who was combing his hair and facing the opposite way. Marshall had to remember not to kill him, but just to pretend. Grabbing him violently from behind, he put his hand over the poor Bengali’s mouth, and pulled him instantly backward beyond the few sandbags. Marshall held the knife at the terrified sentry’s throat. “You’re dead. Understand? Dead. Shut up. Okay?” The Bengali nodded. Then Marshall hopped into the sandbag redoubt and lay flat.
He placed the grenades in front of him, pulled their pins, and tossed them. They exploded quite loudly even though they were not real. Lenny and Robert opened fire, emptying four clips before the amazed victims could even see what was happening. Had the grenades been real and the bullets not blanks, the citadel troops would have been dead. They had not even turned their machine gun, or lifted a weapon against their attackers.
Robert and Lenny ran up, holding their freshly loaded weapons on the troops and officers. Marshall was already there.